


Backstroke

by aerialiste



Series: Galveston [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon What Canon, Charlie Bradbury Lives, Fallen Angels, Galveston Island, Human Castiel, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Veterinary Medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-07-23 19:31:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7476960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Well, shit,” Dean said aloud into the empty room, eyes still closed. “Okay then.”</em>
</p><p> </p><p>So Dean finally got his act together, and he and Cas are now officially doing…whatever <em>this</em> is. But Cas has a complicated past of his own, and in the words of a new friend, "When they think they’ve got you, you have to remember you’re worth getting." It's just that Dean has never in his life felt like something worth getting, much less keeping—although Castiel seems to want to try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wildhoneypie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildhoneypie/gifts).



> This picks up right where "[Crawl](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4265076)" left off, so if you haven't read that before, you might want to. I hope you like it, petals,—thank you for reading & sharing.
> 
> Now with its own handy rebloggable [tumblr gifset](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com/post/151622128851/backstroke-26k-words-by-aerialiste-for)!

_Love is a dangerous angel. —Francesca Lia Block_

When he woke, he was alone.

He lay there for a while, quiet, thinking about this, about why he knew this. He always woke alone; why was it important now? Where was he? Or was the question _when_ —when _was_ now—should Sam be nearby and wasn’t, had some entity moved him through time, forward, backward, elsewhere, another place—why was he so excruciatingly conscious of the _alone._ He held still, knew from long experience you just had to wait these things out.

Finally the incessant surf solved it for him, and the fact that—he shifted his hips against the sheets to make sure—he wasn’t wearing anything. Galveston; Cas. _Castiel._

“Well, shit,” Dean said aloud into the empty room, eyes still closed. “Okay then.”

•

He collected his clothes, which were more or less everywhere, before spotting the post-it Cas had likely stuck to the kitchen table or fridge; but the air was so humid nothing remained adhesive for long. “RUNNING/SWIMMING,” it said, in Cas’s angular uppercase, and that was all.

Dean found his duffel, finally, shoved halfway under the bed, and pulled a clean t-shirt over his head, raking his hands through his hair and peering outside. A dull gray rain fell in intermittent sheets into the same-colored water and, as vile as it looked, Dean could feel it was some degrees warmer than when he’d arrived, maybe even a non-lethal temperature for swimming. Would Cas tangle with any of those stinging purple floaty things out there? He told himself he wasn’t worried; rolled up the sleeves on yesterday’s flannel shirt, pulled on a pair of sweatpants (yes, those…were bite marks), starting rummaging around in the kitchen.

From the dish drainer he retrieved a ceramic drip funnel; in a cabinet, found brown paper filters; and then, in the tiny freezer, a peach-colored can of Café du Monde. Blearily he arranged these on the counter and was about to fill the kettle, trying to ignore and mostly succeeding how he knew exactly where all these things were, and how Cas liked his coffee (which reminded him to look for half-and-half in the dorm-sized fridge, and put honey on the table, because Cas drank not coffee, but what Dean considered melted coffee ice cream).

Not-thinking was working pretty well for him until he heard the door at the bottom of the stairs open and close with a bang from the wind, and then in a rush his entire body remembered, remembered that they’d woken in the middle of the night and Cas had crawled on top of him, between his legs, and bitten his neck and mouthed his way down Dean’s body, licking his stomach and they’d _done it all over again;_ and then he could feel himself flush all over with the vividness of it, knees suddenly weak with plain lust, and his entire torso went into a sort of breathless cramp, so that he was held up by the counter, hands braced and vaguely staring at the linoleum, when he felt rather than saw Cas appear behind him, radiating intensity the way he did, still out of breath.

Dean told himself he should stand up, turn around, and speak plain words like a goddamn grown-ass man, but he seemed stuck in a loop of disbelief.

Cas’s palm, then, damp and strong on one shoulder; and something rippled through him, his muscles unlocked as if he’d been pinned by a demon and was suddenly free to move. He wheeze-laughed despite himself, because it was like old times—Cas randomly appearing behind him all crazy hair and wild eyes and zero sense of normal, the way Sam and him would slide suddenly from the wall in a limp heap, scrabbling madly for weapons. Dean let himself relax into the point of heat that was Cas’s touch for half-a-second, before turning around.

Whatever smart-ass comment he’d been about to lead with, though, died in his mouth, because Cas was also completely naked. Dean made a sound that was a cross between air coming out of a bike tire very suddenly and a confused Scooby-Doo.

Cas raised an eyebrow in disbelief, for which Dean was grateful, because things happening on Cas’s face meant he could legitimately stare at it and no lower.

“Dean, I live at the very end of the island and it’s pouring rain. There’s no one out here but us—why would I wear clothes?”

He had no answer for this or for, in fact, well, anything. Cas’s shoulders were sunburnt brown and his biceps were—there they were. Cas swiped a hand over his forehead, hair dark with water, bare chest damp, and slung an arc of droplets to the floor, finally ( _finally_ ) reaching for the towel over the back of one chair.

“Dude,” Dean objected feebly, “Gulf water?”

Cas laughed and Dean would never get over that, not ever, not in another forty years. Which meant he imagined he would be spending whatever was left of his next forty years with Cas, his mind supplied helpfully. Dean chose to skim past that for the moment. His mouth was watering, which didn’t make sense, except it did, and his hands wanted things in an already familiar way—

“There’s an outdoor shower, as you know perfectly well, but presumably always forget because you’ve never once gone swimming,” Cas pointed out.

This was true on both counts; and just then the kettle made a simmering sound, so Dean turned to it with relief. He busied himself fidgeting with the drip cone, hyperaware, catching electric glimpses of Cas in his periphery.

Cas finished scrubbing at his hair so that it stood up all over his head, knotted the towel around his hips (merciful gods), and sidled up beside Dean for all the world like it was his space to occupy, hooking his chin over Dean’s shoulder and curling an arm around his waist. Dean was too bone-shocked to make any gesture, whether protest or moving closer, so instead he kept steadily pouring water in a thin stream over the grounds, waiting for the bloom to come up.

They stood there in mutual quiet, Cas seemingly contented, Dean more or less dissociating, both enveloped in the warm fragrance. Eventually Cas pressed a kiss to his shoulder and released him.

“Let me get dressed, and then I have a little work—then we can talk about what you want to do while you’re here. And, Dean…maybe some other things.”

Dean kept his back to him and nodded vigorously, hoping this passed for assent. “Sounds good,”—he bit off the “buddy” at the end, that almost involuntarily followed. Pretty sure you weren’t supposed to call someone “buddy” after you’d scrabbled half-sobbing at their shoulders as they swallowed around your cock. Probably good post-coital etiquette.

And having thought that, abruptly he really couldn’t keep the flashbacks at bay, hadn’t even known he’d been trying to until everything flooded back—tactile, auditory, tangible memories of Cas’s mouth, hands, breath, weight, sounds (jesus god the _sounds_ )—it all poured back into him at once, there was suddenly too much blood in his body and saliva in his mouth, his knees felt watery and it was all he could do not to turn around and go tackle Cas back into the bed and make more of that happen right the fuck _now_. He was only a few feet away. He could close that distance and have his mouth on those same shoulders, lick away the water beaded there, tongue at the warm tanned skin beneath—and why shouldn’t he, it was just another freaky new moment for them, the way shit had always been bizarre around Cas, and at least he knew for certain they were in it together, they always had been—that wasn’t even in _doubt_ —

Instead, he took a deep shaky breath and carefully folded the used filter and tossed it into the trash, licking that one single drip of hot bitter liquid off his palm, the drop that always fell when you got greedy and wanted your coffee too fast and didn’t let it drain long enough. He opened the half-and-half carton, and then stood there a long time.

Behind him he heard a drawer opening and closing and Cas—was that—Cas was _whistling,_ an aimless melodic in-and-out piccolo Dean remembered from Bobby working around the salvage yard. Sometimes Bobby would buttdial him or Sam and they’d sit in the Impala laughing and playing the message, their voicemail filled up with ten minutes of just whistling, punctuated only by curses, hammering sounds, or the clank of dropping things. Had Cas picked that up from Bobby? What would Bobby have said about—

He could feel it viscerally, the way he still felt Missouri or Ellen frapping him over the back of the head sometimes when even he knew he was being especially annoying—could feel Bobby’s incredulity that he’d somehow raised an idiot. 

_The fuck is wrong with you, boy—you love the man, so be with him. Even a dull-edged tool like you should be able to figure_ that _out. We ain’t none of us got that much time—_

“We stopped another apocalypse,” he told Bobby, the way he still talked to him sometimes when he was alone, staring out the window, half-and-half forgotten in his hand. “Couple of them, actually. We did okay, but we lost you. We lost Jo and Ellen, you knew that, plus some others you didn’t—you never even met them, but it was bad. And Cas fell—he was always kind of falling, I guess—but he fell, he’s human, Bobby, he’s a straight-up—okay, not straight, but he’s a dude, permanently. And for so long, you said it to me yourself, he’s been my—”

_—best friend, and now I’m pretty sure I’m falling in love with him, or maybe already have, so what happens when there’s_ another _apocalypse, or some_ new _monster, and the stupidest thing of all is I don’t even care because I just need to put my mouth on his, did you ever feel that way, probably most people do, it’s just strange to me because I always kept it from—I never let it get to me, okay, so I didn’t even see this coming, and yeah I know, I’m an idjit, but now it’s happened and now I want him, I want him all the time and I don’t know how to_ do _that—_

Dean couldn’t sustain this train of thought, strung out like it was between flashes of sensation, those heart-pounding images of them ravaging each other’s bodies in the darkness and the feeling of Cas everywhere, moving against him, skin pressed to skin. He wanted to hurt him, leave marks, wanted Cas to do the same to him; had been half-hard all morning, breath tight in his chest.

How was this supposed to go, did it have an ending, he didn’t see or want one. There was no way to think his way through all of it, and _you’re not that good at thinking your way through stuff anyway, speaking of which, shit, you better call Sam, and oh my god he and Charlie are never going to shut up about this in a million fucking_ years _._

He stirred a thick spoonful of honey into the milky cup and turned, defeated by his half-awake brain, to carry it to Cas.

•

Fortified by coffee, Dean poached eggs while Cas did something important on his tablet, judging from all the muttering and frowning and exasperated poking at the screen. He found tortillas wrapped in paper, buttered and salted the eggs and then folded them in with some greens he’d dutifully steamed in the vinegary poaching water, primarily as a punishment to himself. Cas barely looked up, as usual a fucking ingrate about being fed but Dean not even able to get that hassled about it, just eyerolling behind his back about angels being big spoiled diapered _babies_ when it came to looking after themselves.

He stood by the window eating his breakfast, gazing unfocused as the storm cleared and the sun came out. When he looked down at his plate he saw the smudge of a bruise, purple like the inside of an old potato, on the soft part of his wrist.

Afterward, neither of them having spoken much, he left Cas to do the dishes and slipped downstairs and outside to text rather than call Sam; he didn’t trust his voice not to give everything away. Whatever _everything_ meant.

In the end he was saved from having to speak with either Sam or Charlie by Galveston’s total lack of cell coverage, maybe worse than usual because of the storm. A final blast of rain came in bright sunlight—falling straight down, rather than sideways as usual, for which he was grateful since Cas’s shack was on stilts and open on all four sides, except for the small outdoor shower (right), enclosed by bamboo blinds rolled up and fastened with a cord. An inside-out pair of blue shorts hung thrown over the edge, soaking wet, and the sight of them did things to Dean that he thought he should probably start trying to get used to.

He gave up on sending the text after its fourth failure and headed back inside to email. It’d be easier than texting, anyway, no back-and-forth. Just: _I’m here, Cas is fine, I’ll be back on_ —which day? He didn’t want to leave. Did he have to leave? Why would he leave? Cas had to go back to work at some point, presumably; but maybe Dean could be his housewife. It didn’t sound that bad, actually. He wondered if Cas had cable or just wifi.

It wasn’t that he wanted to keep anything from Sam; he didn’t even know yet what exactly it was he was keeping. He just knew it needed to be kept carefully, as if it could break. Everything seemed so crystalline last night in the moonlight, being shaken to pieces under Cas’s certain hands and relentless mouth. Now it was daylight and he felt confused and squirrelly, like they were supposed to be scouring police blotters for a hunt, or he should already have been cracking open his first tepid hair-of-the-dog beer and waiting out the dull headache. He was used to a cold knot of misery ratcheted tightly inside his stomach and it just wasn’t there; he kept poking around trying to find it, and it set him on edge.

•

Upstairs, Cas sat cross-legged and bare-chested on Dean’s side ( _goddammit_ ) of the bed, sheets pulled up comfortably around him in his preferred nesting configuration as he sipped at coffee number three? four? and absently tried to flatten his hair by running fingers through it, no one having apparently taught him about product in all this time.

He looked up as soon as Dean’s head appeared in the stairwell.

“Done avoiding me?” Cas asked, lightly; but Dean could hear what was underneath it. “I emailed Charlie, by the way; she said she’d pass it on to Sam. But they figured you were fine.”

Dean exhaled and made himself sit on the edge of the bed, looking down at his hands.

_I’m only avoiding this_ , he thought, as clearly and loudly as possible, _because I don’t know what to say_. 

Back in the day Cas probably would have been prowling around in his head like a creeper, and would have _felt_ what he was trying to say—after all, he had to have known about the long months after Mary’s death when Dean didn’t talk at all—so did he know it had happened again after Charlie’s murder?

(Weeks of closing his eyes only to see her, body limp and emptied. Because of _him_. Dean hadn’t uttered a word until he caught his brother looking up spells for undoing muteness curses. “Not that kind of curse, Sammy,” he’d said in a near-whisper, voice washed out from disuse. Closing his hands over Sam’s, where they were white-knuckling the spellbook, to ease it slowly from his grip.)

That bleak, all but blotted-out period of the Mark: almost entirely hazed over by alcohol and blank rage, bracketed off at the end with Cas’s arms holding him back from driving a claw hammer into Sam like a hatchet. Dean only had flashes of that, blurs of lost time spangled with flashes of pain, until the sudden clear memory of startling even himself by taking a scythe to Death—which had brought Charlie back (along with Kevin, as it happened, who’d gotten shut of the Winchesters as fast as possible. Last they’d heard he was in his final year at CalTech, double-majoring in applied chemistry and, surprise, linguistics).

Now he turned his palms up in wonder, confused, because they actually _hurt_ , and he was starting to understand that maybe he’d let something out of him that wouldn’t ever go back inside, that the only place his hands would stop burning would be if they were pressed against, were on the skin of, were touching—

Blindly he turned toward Cas, swallowing back something frantic, flinched as Cas almost dropped his cup on the nightstand, coffee sloshing over the edge, and without asking, as if it were his right, pulled Dean into his arms. Dean couldn’t let go at first, fists clenching air, and then went with the movement and it worked again, the same as the night before—they fit together in some inexplicable way, both intoxicatingly new and totally familiar.

He ended up with his arms around Cas’s bare waist, his body caught chastely between Cas’s thighs, face pressed against his side. Cas’s warm grip circled Dean’s shoulders loosely, rubbing them through his t-shirt.

Cas pressed a few easy kisses to the top of his head, and then just buried his face in Dean’s hair and inhaled.

“I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you,” Cas said, muffled against Dean’s hair, before he pulled back to keep speaking. “But you overthink everything, like that’s going to save you, and at the same time you pretend you’re incapable of thought. It hurts to watch.” Cas paused, tightening his hold for a moment before he added, almost inaudibly, “I would keep you from doing it if you let me. Restrain you, immobilize you, even, until you drop your defenses.”

This unexpected confession ran through Dean like voltage; he couldn’t think of anything to say in response, which was fine because he had a sense that the man holding him (apparently kinky; it’s always the quiet ones) was about to talk enough for both of them, plus maybe a few extra people all named Sam. He resigned himself to this, settled against Cas for the long haul.

“When I first started running, I tried to run without clothing, to feel that freedom; but I discovered I had to wear…something,” Cas began. Dean could tell he was right, this was going to be a lengthy disquisition, and he snorted at Cas’s professorial tone as much as at the image of a perplexed new human discovering that bouncing junk didn’t add to the exercise experience.

“There was so much I didn’t know, and I had to learn it all experientially. Microwaved burritos and sprained wrists and letting my phone run out of minutes or the car run out of gas were the least of it.”

Dean pressed his cheek down into Cas’s chest, listening to the burr of his voice buzzing through his ribcage. “Even before I fell, though, something happened to my, my _patterning_ so early on, long before anyone noticed. You could think of it almost like an abnormal childhood development, only happening over tens of thousands of years.”

“Cas, if you’re saying you were the weird kid at school, we all knew that. Even _God_ knew that.” Dean let his eyes drift shut and felt Cas’s fingertips, cool, tracing first one eyebrow, then the other.

“Yes, but none of us really knew what it meant.” The fingers moved from eyebrows to forehead and into hairline, massaging away tension that had been there so long Dean had sort of thought it was just part of his anatomy.

“Naomi—she said you always came back wrong, every time?”

“Well, wrong for her goals—or for Heaven’s purposes, yes. As to the cause: there are at least five distinct possibilities, or more likely a combination of them, as overdetermination always better explains complex phenomena.”

“Oh god, please tell me you don’t have a pie chart.”

Cas continued unhurriedly, decade-long veteran of refusing to be hustled along by an impatient Dean. “One of the factors may have been that my fit with Jimmy’s vessel was unprecedentedly…tight,” (here Dean fought back a grin, because he was an actual ten-year-old), “but then there was also the act of pulling first you, and then Sam, from Hell. That changed me on what you’d think of as…as an atomic level. No angel had done it since Jerusalem fell—no one had even tried—so the Host had no practical knowledge as to what restoring your human structure and knowing it so intimately might do to my own. How it might…distort me.”

Dean wanted to interrupt, say he was wrong—Cas was describing all the stuff that made him awesome, not abnormal; but he let him continue, not least because Cas was now scratching through the hair at the back of his neck and Dean felt completely boneless.

“Then, maybe Gabriel played some unknown part in my upbringing, some part he never admitted, and about which the Host never knew.” Cas paused. “Of course then that brings up the separate, parenthetical question of why _Gabriel_ himself is—was, the way he was. He might not even have been trying to influence me. Perhaps it was just him, his way of being a brother. That can exert a profound effect, I believe, having watched you over the years with Sam.”

Dean thought skeptically about just exactly how much he’d been able to influence Sam: that is, not a goddamn bit. He wondered if Gabriel had been as constantly frustrated as he had. Underneath him, Cas shifted, tugging a pillow behind his own neck, and somehow drew them both down into the nest of sheets yet more comfortably.

“It might be that every time I was brought back, I was altered, as well. You probably noticed the difference; certainly Heaven did.” Dean tried to nod but he didn’t have much room, with Cas combing through his hair.

“And then, of course, far back before all that—when I first walked the earth as a soldier of the Host, at the beginning of humanity’s ascendance as a dominant life-form. Just because most of those memories were wiped doesn’t mean they didn’t _change_ me. You don’t remember all of Hell either, Dean. I took from you what details I could. But it still altered you, forever—not necessarily as damage,” he added, as he felt Dean’s body shift in preparation, ready to protest. “In many ways it made you more tender-hearted. You could never see that, but I could.”

He moved the pads of his fingers to Dean’s temples and started circling there, exerting gentle pressure. Dean fought back a moan but leaned into the touch, he hoped not too obviously, self-conscious about the gray that had cropped up there since his last visit.

“Whether the Host was right and my Father created me defective, or whether I became that way, in the end I always _did_ have a crack running down the middle. A seam—a flaw, a tear. Forever torn between helping you and doing my duty to Heaven. But I always chose humanity, Dean. I always chose you.”

His lips moved across Dean’s forehead now, speaking the words directly into his skin between kisses, and Dean felt a surge of want pulsing down his arms and legs. He held still with difficulty, letting Cas have a chance to finish whatever it was he was saying.

“So this is—this means that now—” He hesitated for so long that Dean risked opening his eyes and looking up at him, as Cas tried again.

“You and I, whatever we were supposed to be—we weren’t _ever_ going to be that. So now we don’t have to—Dean, _you_ don’t have to—”

He finally gave up, compressed his lips and shook his head, looking away. In the gap Dean’s voice returned, and with it a shred of his usual sass.

“Angel of the lord, at a loss for words?” he teased, only a little distracted by the smoothness of Cas’s chest under his cheek. “You guys usually never shut up once you get going, now here you are, running dry—what’s that about?”

Cas just kissed his forehead again. Dean would be torn apart by hellhounds before admitting how having his face kissed turned him into something sweetly viscous, like a clean pour of motor oil, the color of caramel or molasses or Cas’s damn farmer’s market honey.

Maybe Cas could still read his mind, too, a little, because he tilted Dean’s head back with his thumb, and kissed him all over with closed mouth: cheeks, eyelids, temples, the sides of his nose, corner of his mouth, point of his chin, ending with his lower lip, drawing it between his with unyielding slowness.

Everything flippant in Dean’s mind turned to sand and blew away. Cas moved back a half-inch, took a deep breath and went on.

“Whatever else I am—your best friend, fighting partner, buddy—yes, I noticed—I’ve always been _yours_. And you’ve stopped this from happening for a decade, with the perfect excuse: your brother, and your species and your world, needed saving. You were made to save them, as surely as I was deliberately broken, to guarantee I would stand by your side and smite your enemies with you.” Cas spoke into Dean’s ear, quietly hoarse, one hand still cradling his chin.

“But it’s been saved, Dean. It’s done. We saved it—from Lucifer and Michael. From Eve, from the Leviathan; from the Mark and the Darkness, and from God.” His voice dropped. “From Sam, and from you and from me: we even saved it from ourselves.”

Dean looked up and both wordlessly acknowledged: that was worst of all. The damages they’d each wrought against what they were supposedly trying to rescue.

“We were meant to be used up by this, to burn away; but we didn’t. So now, however you think of me—an old war comrade, a brother you can treat like Sam, someone to fleece at card games and tease about not getting your jokes, someone to shove out of your mind and never call, even when every cell of your body misses mine—Dean, look at me—I was broken in exactly the ways you need, not just for fighting side-by-side: for affinity. Last night was _real_ , it wasn’t orchestrated by the Host, we weren’t in Purgatory or at the end of all things, I could feel it _in your skin_ and I know you could too, you showed up with all of yourself. You didn’t fight it or twist away or change the subject, you were here, everything about you is finally ready to admit that good things can h—”

Here Cas broke off, because Dean had pulled away from his loose hold, surged upward on his knees, and was kissing him like he might never get to again.

(And he might not. You never knew, they had a weird way of losing each other; Bobby was right far too often. Dean had a way of losing everyone.)

This time he wouldn’t. He knew because when he dug his fingers into a handful of hair at the nape of Cas’s neck and pulled his head backward so he could kiss him better, Cas just laughed quietly into his mouth, tasting like chicory and honey and, and was that a cigarette, okay they were going to have to talk about that, just as soon as he was done licking each of Cas’s teeth inquisitively one by one, done letting Cas suck Dean’s tongue into his mouth, done drinking in his breath,—he was real, he was a _person_ , he was yielding and sighing and letting his muscles fall slack under Dean’s touch, except for the strong hands gripping his hips and the taut thighs wrapped around his.

“I want to see something,” Dean panted, finally tearing his mouth away, which gave Cas, more highly focused, a chance to pull off Dean’s t-shirt.

“So do I,” Cas murmured, sliding downward in bed so he could run his lips all over Dean’s chest, finding the tender downy places, nuzzling into each scar and then flipping them both over before Dean quite knew what was happening. Cas leaned down and made a muted sound of approval, curling his fingers around Dean’s forearms and holding them pressed to the mattress at his sides while he bit a line of tiny fierce sparks up along Dean’s collarbone, licking across his tattoo and then blowing over the wet skin, gaze intense enough to turn coal into a diamond. Dean shuddered and lunged up to catch Cas’s mouth, but could only manage to graze sloppily against his jawline before being shoved not-quite-roughly-enough backward on the bed again.

This time Cas shifted his weight and dragged Dean’s arms up above his head, pinning both wrists to the pillow easily with one hand as he tongued roughly at each nipple, and Dean held his breath so as not to whimper or arch up into his mouth. When Cas licked into the wing below Dean’s armpit, though, worrying at the muscle through the skin, Dean flinched and swore, unable to decide if he were ticklish or aroused or frustrated, or all three at once, and writhed despite himself, trapped beneath Cas’s weight, not that he minded that. At all.

“How does this keep _happening_ —you’re a pushy little fucker, you know that?” said Dean, trying to sound cocky despite being totally out of breath and having difficulty keeping his voice from cracking. Cas only tightened his grip around Dean’s wrists and started licking stripes along each rib, making a soft gratified noise between wide flat strokes of his tongue. Dean fought for air.

“They’re still there, aren’t they—they say I belong to you? That I’m yours? Your property?” He knew how to do this part, at least. He didn’t know how to do any of the rest of what they were doing, not a single second of it, but he knew how to be flirtatious and seductive, he was an old hand at that.

In response he got a glare and a reproving hard slap to the inside of his thigh, which stung and sent a stupid thrill through him and made his dick jump in his sweatpants. He knew Cas hadn’t missed that, knew he was probably flushed and wide-eyed. It had barely been even a few _hours_ and this shit was already messed up and he _wanted_ it that way, wanted all of it so badly.

Cas let go of his wrists, sat back smoothly on his calves, fingers poised at the edge of Dean’s sweats as if waiting for permission. “What did you want to see?”

Dean grinned, easy. Cas had returned it to him, given it back to him so he could handle it, now. “What you’re wearing under that sheet.”

That eyebrow again. “Air?” Cas wound up the sheets in one hand and dragged them to the side, so that Dean could see what he hadn’t been able to the night before, only drawn mental pictures of in the dark, been too nervous to look at this morning: narrow waist, hip bones, flat stomach with its dusting of prickly stubble, heavily muscled thighs, curving flushed cock and drawn-up balls.

“Okay but dude,” breathed Dean, having lost his brief remnant of cool, because seeing all of Cas had him so turned on he could hardly get enough oxygen, wanting his mouth all over that sleekness between his legs—“Why the hell did you shave everywhere? Was that, like, some kind of a Zen thing, or—”

Cas looked away for a second, before eyeing Dean sideways. “I’m not sure this is the—perhaps you don’t want to hear about that now.”

For once in his life, Dean decided to listen. He sat up, pushing Cas back down to the foot of the bed and kicking his sweatpants off onto the floor, kissing his way up each thigh, at the last second bypassing his crotch teasingly for stomach, chest, neck. “Tell me something else,” he whispered, holding his palm up to Cas’s mouth. Cas’s eyes widened for a bare instant and then he started to lick, closing his eyes and drawing Dean’s fingers between his lips one by one—so suggestively that Dean had to pause this operation to kiss him—after which Dean finally gave up and just held his hand to his own mouth, let saliva collect in the palm before sliding it down between them and testing how difficult it was to hold them both together, shifting his hips so they lined up, and how should he—did they, was it side-by-side? or would it be better to have one on top of the—

Cas’s body arched beneath his with a stifled yelp and Dean involuntarily sank his teeth into the side of Cas’s neck. They both froze, dazed with pleasure. Okay, not so difficult then. Maybe he didn’t need Cas’s advice on this one. Maybe it was pretty fucking intuitive.

He tightened his fist, drawing slickness from both of them, and with the added sensation it was too much, he couldn’t keep his eyes open; he dropped his head down onto Cas’s shoulder, gulping, feeling as if he were glowing from the inside out.

He tried to hold still, to wait for Cas—to fit into how he would move, how he liked it, what made it best for him. Dean raised up on his other arm again, watching Cas’s face, eyes closed and lips parted, eyelashes dark against the bright color of his cheekbones—and then with a rush of something like anger, he couldn’t not move, he wanted to wreck Cas, make him desperate, ruin him for anyone but Dean, drive away everything, everyone, whoever he hadn’t wanted to talk about just now. Frustrated, he thrust upward, once—an explosion of curse words scattering in his brain—and then stopped cold.

Cas’s eyes flew open, hips struggling to move against Dean’s locked ones, looking up at him helplessly, as if they were at Stull about to take on genocidal archangels, that bewildered _don’t blame_ me _,_ I _don’t know, this was_ your _damn idea_.

“Dean, what are you—don’t stop,” he tried, his voice shredded, and Dean felt such a surge of mingled pride and lust pull through him that it made him woozy.

He took over Cas’s mouth again, aching, wanting more—he didn’t know what, he had Cas pressed as closely to him as he could get but it still somehow wasn’t all, there was something more but what the fuck was it. “Goddammit, I can’t get you _close_ enough,” he groaned between kisses, their mouths clinging, Cas’s arms around him so tightly there was hardly room to move but that didn’t matter, all that mattered was getting all of his skin up against all of Cas’s. Why hadn’t he done this when Cas first walked upstairs, naked and dripping with water. It was over for him, he was never going to be able to stand another day of his life without having this.

“Fuck you, say it again, tell me, I want to hear you say it,” Dean wrenched out, and Cas’s eyes flashed in a familiar dangerous way.

“Don’t, don’t you dare stop—please, I need you, we still need to fuck, we’ve needed to for so long and you _knew_ it, you _want_ to come all over me, you knew I wanted you, and I needed you to want me back, Dean, I need _you_ —”

“You fucking have me, you know you do,” he ground back, shifting his grip and giving in to it, moving, sliding down once, slowly, then thrusting up again fast, so that a whole new constellation flared behind his eyelids and Cas actually shouted wordlessly against his shoulder, tightening his thighs around Dean’s hips—then shook his head to clear it, biting his lip, pulling at Dean’s neck with both hands, trying to lock eyes with him and say something coherent.

“Shhh, babe, later, just, just this—just let this be this,” Dean begged, unable to stop moving now, fucking against him desperately, Cas’s hands grabbing his hips for traction so that his upward thrusts were timed with Cas grinding back up into him, and within seconds Cas had thrown his head back and was crying out with every stroke, which Dean thought probably meant he was close, and he tightened his fist and moved his hand the best he could between their bodies—he didn’t want it to accelerate like this, sweeping up so fast through them it threatened to end already, but the thought of Cas coming against him, letting go all over him because of _him_ was too much, so that it was he who surprised himself, choking out “Cas, I can’t—wait, slow down, baby it’s too good— _fuck_ I’m gonna come—” and Cas surged up against him, grabbed his head, and kissed him, swallowed down all of Dean’s noises, loud and messy and by the end of it he was flipped over and flat on his back, chest heaving, with Cas straddling him and jerking off against his stomach, white strings of Dean’s own come dripping back down onto him from Cas’s dick, Cas’s head bent forward, whimpering and strung-out, his hand whipping back and forth on his flushed, straining cock in a blur, hanging there on the edge of a plateau. Dean knew that place, where you needed your lover to shove you over the edge somehow, and with what felt like the last of his energy, he lifted himself up on his elbows, wetted the fingers of one hand with his own come and circled Cas’s nipple, scratching across it and down his chest to his belly, saying low, “I know what you want, baby, I want it too—you want inside me, want to fuck me, get your come all up in me—” and felt a flare of triumph when Cas doubled over, and let out a strangled sound as he shot all over Dean’s chest, and fuck if that wasn’t the hottest thing to happen to Dean in the last—few seconds, maybe. And just before he collapsed backward onto the bed and everything went dim Dean was vaguely aware of Cas lapping at his skin, sucking everything off him, and Dean’s thumb at the corner of his mouth, disbelieving and utterly stunned.

He came to probably not more than a minute later with Cas lying sideways between his legs, cheek pillowed on one thigh. He ran his fingertips gently across the sweaty back of Cas’s neck.

“You are one depraved motherfucking vet tech,” he got out, before Cas turned back onto his stomach and, flashing what Dean was coming to think of as The Eyebrow, pulled Dean’s now-soft cock into his mouth, tonguing at it experimentally, rolling it from cheek to cheek.

“Wasted effort there, babe, remember who’s about to turn forty,” he slurred. It was hard to talk, his face felt slack and swollen. Cas just flickered both eyebrows again, this time in an expression which reminded Dean somehow of Gabriel, and stayed where he was, holding Dean lightly between the warmth of his tongue and soft palate, as if that were a good place for a spent cock to hang out, arms wrapped snugly around Dean’s ass like he needed to hold him still, when Dean couldn’t have moved if an entire demon army had come through the door.

He slid a grateful hand into Cas’s hair and lost more time after that, waking only to feel Cas rubbing his face against Dean’s stomach tenderly, kissing the space below his navel. He would have rolled his eyes again at the pointless ambition of this but was too close to unconscious, and this time didn’t wake again until he heard Cas downstairs, talking to someone who wasn’t Dean. Someone—Dean’s eyes snapped open—whose voice was disturbingly fucking familiar.

But it couldn’t be. It didn’t make any sense. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog, his body too relaxed, saturated in sex and Cas; reached for his phone automatically, to check for messages from Sam alerting him to some hideous danger, and, still addled, nearly knocked over Cas’s coffee, already dripping from the nightstand and puddling on the floor.

(Nothing from Sam, only a long-ass text from Charlie reminding him to bring her and Sam their annual list of hard-to-find freaky stuff from The Witchery, basically Galveston’s equivalent of the Magic Box. She never volunteered what the often-creepy items on their list were for, and Dean never asked.)

Dean sat up in bed all the way, straining to hear the voice again, but now it was just Cas’s interlaced together with—with hers, both laughing in a muffled hysterical kind of way. He could only just make out Cas’s affectionate, “Come up for tea; it’s been too long, Kali-Ma.”


	2. Chapter 2

Dean started grabbing clothes at random in something approaching cold terror, or maybe rage. It was generally hard for him to tell the difference, and it usually didn’t matter that much, because his reaction to either was the same: start moving, away from or toward. And the beach house only had one exit.

 _You just told Cas you wanted him to fuck you, that’s gotta bring bad luck right there_ , he told himself grimly. _Winchesters don’t fucking_ get _breaks_. _If it seems like something’s going right, that means it’s a trick. Why did I forget that with_ him _of all people. Angels._

Outside, as if in mockery, the rain had completely stopped and the sun come out burning; but the surf kept up its noisy crashing. Cas looked up over the stairwell still shirtless, hair rumpled but unfairly calm, propping his chin on his forearm. “Dean? I’m sorry, you were sleeping. Would you—do you mind if—”

Dean turned his back to yank a t-shirt over his head, and made his voice hard. “Sure, man. Whatever. It’s fine.” The shirt smelled like Cas. He hated everything.

The small silence drew out longer than it should have. He felt Cas’s eyes but refused to acknowledge them, pulling on his socks haphazardly. _No breaks._ Dean zipped up his jeans and turned around just in time to see Cas letting go of her—yes, _Kali’s_ —hand to drape her raincoat on the banister. She looked different but the same, shaking out cropped hair dyed dark blue, slim in black jeans and a soft yellow sweater. He would have known her anywhere. Gods were like that, somehow staying themselves through every transformation.

She kept one hand on Cas’s arm, looking over at Dean with unvarnished delight. “Castiel…really?” Something unnameable simmered between them, despite Cas looking over at Dean with clear concern.

Everything behind Dean’s sinuses went white.

Anger, then; not fear. Move toward, rather than away from.

•

Cas boiled a pot of milky tea on the stove, which seemed heretical to Dean, because even he knew you weren’t supposed to boil tea; but then he started adding spices, and Kali sniffed the air in approval. It smelled sweet, like cinnamon, saffron, cardamom pods—Dean figured it was some traditional witchy chai-thing that only weirdos like deities and angels and hippies liked, though he wasn’t sure under which category to file his present company.

Kali and Cas chattered away in what sounded a little like Hindi but Dean guessed was probably Sanskrit. Kali sat comfortably at the dining table, as though she were no stranger to it, one leg curled under her, hands wrapped around her cup, breathing in its steam with appreciation. Her chin-length hair was straight and glossy, if inexplicably blue. She seemed perfectly normal for a wrathful deity, and exuded a deep calm, like she hadn’t ever even thought about drowning anyone in their own blood. She also wore pale aqua-green Nikes with a black swoosh, and Dean couldn’t stop staring at them, which was easier than looking at her face.

Cas offered Dean a mug, but he shook his head, aware he was being not only stubborn but rude, yet unable to stop. Cas had been smart enough not to try to touch him, and instead sank into a chair at the table himself, reaching out casually and touching the back of Kali’s hand. She turned hers palm up and they sat there, hands loosely clasped, smiling at each other. Dean wondered if it were possible for his head to explode; maybe this was the trendy all-new how-to-kill-humans strategy: seduce them and then just make them detonate with jealousy.

At a loss for any course of direct action, he started drying the silverware with hostile flourishes of dishtowel. Before he could scramble an accusatory sentence together, Kali turned to him, head a little on one side like an angel’s.

“Dean Winchester,” she said, her voice unexpectedly sympathetic. “I owe you…some apologies. But first I want you to know, I am not as I was. Things have changed with me. With all the gods.”

Cas took a sip of chai, then fiddled with the handle on his mug before looking up, expression tense. “I didn’t remember to mention what happened. Maybe Sam said something—but you should know.”

Dean blew out his held breath, tossed down the towel, and turned to look out the kitchen window blindly, jaw set because whatever shit these two were about to drop on him, he was too fucking old to let it hurt him.

“Well _this_ is off to a great start,” he said. “What did you ‘forget’ to tell me this time, Cas. And by the way, last time I saw this chick? She was doing a really good job of trying to impale your brother. Or did you forget that too.”

 _And why is she sitting at your table like she belongs here, and why are you holding her hand like—you know what, fuck it, doesn’t matter. Be back at the bunker tomorrow,_ he told himself _, if I drive straight through—_

“Castiel isn’t hiding anything from you,” Kali said simply. “What I mean is that the gods became human too. All of us. And unlike angels, we had no way to get back—or rather, nowhere to get back _to_.”

He had to admit she sounded different. Less likely to drown people in their own body fluids, maybe. But you couldn’t trust deities. _Or angels, either._

“It’s true,” Cas said, voice pitched so that Dean had to turn around in order to hear him. Which meant he also saw the worry in his face, and the soft fire of those eyes that reached out to hold onto him as if he were important, worth saving, or tenderness, or care. Dean looked away, tried to tighten and close off something in himself that unknotted when Cas looked at him like that.

“That night, the night Sam almost closed the gates and Metatron took my, my grace, the gods fell just like the angels—”

“—we didn’t _fall_ , Castiel,” Kali cut in to correct him, but wearily, as if it were an argument they’d already had many times before. “We don’t share your ridiculous hierarchical ideas of up and down. Sky gods aren’t any better than earth deities. But we were…displaced, you could say, laterally. Moved out of our dimensions of power, and made mortal.”

Dean forced himself to look at her again, saw lighter streaks in her shiny indigo hair. Maybe a goddess could go gray, too. A certain pallor behind her cheer, and a tiredness which made him stand down infinitesimally, since it didn’t look as though she were about to whip out an angel blade, whether one made out of a soda can or real (though come to think of it, even a soda can would be deadly).

“And Gabriel?” he heard himself ask. He had aimed for cruelty, maybe wanting to get back at Cas, a little, but it came out sounding petulant and mean.

They both looked down at the glittery-flecked formica table, and Kali put a hand on Cas’s shoulder. “We don’t think so. Probably not. Unless he managed not to be shifted outside of his demesne, and hid somewhere from all of us.”

Cas flinched, shrugged off her hand and said something indistinct, something that sounded like _impossible_ or _stop_ or _not_ , and fled to the balcony, stood out there alone and gripping the railing before Dean could process he was even moving.

Kali sighed, stood up and put her empty cup in the sink, uncomfortably near to Dean, so much so that he could smell her heavy perfume, the same spices as in the chai. Cas had moved to the far end of the balcony, out of view. _If he’s smoking another cigarette I’m gonna kick his ass_ , Dean decided, irritated.

Then: _kryptonite_ , his mind flashed at him, with an extra adrenaline shot of hostility. _We’re supposed to move forward, not backward. Not again, not another one of those times when we almost intersect and then we just keep going—not this time, please—_

Kali broke into his thoughts. “Try to understand what it was like for Castiel at the time, before you judge us. Before you judge him. He was so lonely.”

Dean backed off, putting the table between them warily. Nothing like a god for oversharing. Well, so he could be blunt right back at her, then.

“For how long,” he said, not a question.

Kali didn’t spare him. “A little more than a year.”

“How did you even find him here—this is literally the armpit of an armpit state. What, were you _hunting_ him?” Dean’s voice grated on his own ears, sullen.

Kali fell quiet a moment, crossing her arms and leaning backward against the counter. “I needed a cover, I had to change who I was,” she said, cautiously, and even through his suspicion Dean realized she was taking a chance by telling him this. “Everyone and their disciple was after us at that point. To keep being Kali was too—too visible. I went back to my Egyptian identity.”

Dean didn’t know his mythology as well as Sam, and didn’t much care. “Isis is pretty overexposed too, you know. Had her own TV show and everything.”

Kali’s expression didn’t change. “Sekhmet; I go by Sara. But you’re not wrong—back then things were more fluid—we didn’t have distinct identities the way we began to do, after monotheism forced us to stabilize and settle. So I _was_ her; also Anat, Ammit, Tawaret, Ma’at, Tiamat, Bast—we were us: sisters, mothers, lovers. We were all me.”

None of this gave Dean any reason not to start slinging clothes into his duffel and planning a stop at the closest liquor store. “So either shitty little islands off the coast of south Texas just happen to be sacred to Sekhmet, or you followed Cas here, because you were so perfect together. And you broke up why again?”

“Him,” Kali said, sounding somehow both sad and accepting. “We both knew it wasn’t anything but both of us missing Gabriel, him missing you. And I didn’t hunt him—we both turned up in New Mexico, at the same monastery. He needed someone, Dean. You didn’t see him then. He was going down like a stone, sinking in deep water without a ripple to show he’d ever been there.”

Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose, thought back to months of texts that only went to Sam and Charlie; how he never read them, only heard the gist. How at least twice a month he’d tell Charlie not to wait up and drive to Kansas City, gradually becoming less and less comfortable tomcatting among waitresses and students who creepily stayed the same age year after year as he grew older.

How he gave out fake phone numbers, never asked for them in return, and, sleepless, was always gone before they woke, always. How many ways there are to disappear and leave a placid surface, unmarked and still, as if you’d never existed in the first place.

Kali watched his face for something only she could see. “He’s loved you since the first moment he realized you didn’t love yourself, Dean. You have to know—all he and I did was prop each other up. Grieved together, chanted to White Tara, spent weeks in silence, learned a little of your pedestrian but effective human magic, enough to get by. When we left the temple, we came to the island because our Vajrayana teacher moved here. You know the Witchery.”

Dean nodded, distracted by the fact that through the window, he could barely see Cas—not looking out at the water but up at the sky; and that had to hurt.

“Well, the practitioners there are the real thing. So yes, we worshipped together, did tantra, kept the ecstatic rites. I needed to unravel a lot of ancient, twisted karma of rage against men. And Castiel is a generous, amazing l—”

“Aaaand you’re done talking.” Dean put up a hand to cut her off, fighting the wave of red that threatened to fill up his entire field of vision. “I get it, okay, _Sara_ —you’re a nice reformed neighborhood-watch goddess—you probably, I don’t know, teach Buddhist Sunday school, and drive meals to elderly shut-ins. And I’m sorry about Gabe, despite everything. I really am. But right now?” Dean tilted his head toward the deck. “I need to talk to _him_. So if you don’t mind. Giving us some space.”

Kali squared her shoulders, stuck out her hand and Dean shook it, with only a little misgiving. Her small palm was calloused and her grip was strong. Whatever Sara did for a living, she clearly didn’t have a desk job.

“Then stop backing the fuck down, Dean Winchester,” she said, suddenly a goddess again, appraising him through the fall of her bangs; he could almost see the dark kohl drawn around her eyes. “Don’t you _dare_ leave him alone,” and in a whirl she was gone down the stairwell, before he even had a chance to formulate a snappy comeback. But maybe there wasn’t any coming back from the truth.

•

Somehow, even after everything, the hardest thing to do was still to open the screen door and go out onto the balcony with Cas’s back turned stiffly to him, and move into his space so that they stood, side by side, facing the Gulf.

Cas spoke without looking at him, peeling miniscule strips of paint off the railing. “I thought that went particularly well,” he said dryly, and Dean had to suppress a smile.

“If by ‘well’ you mean ‘completely fucking shitty,’ then yeah, it went awesome,” he said, “but you gotta know this about me by now.” He forced himself to shift even nearer, almost touching Cas’s side, close enough to feel his warmth, and at once everything stupid and wrong started to right itself.

“Cas, look—I’m crap at this.” He tried to reach out, found he couldn’t.

“Then it’s good you don’t have to do it all yourself,” Cas said, turning and linking his fingers behind Dean’s neck, resting his forearms on Dean’s shoulders and looking up into his face. The sun was already out but Dean felt its wattage increase by a factor of ten, and Cas wasn’t even smiling, just looking up at him.

“You’re not addition or even multiplying, you’re, you exponentiate everything,” Dean blurted; then, flushing at Cas’s expression: “Kevin.”

Cas nodded, slowly, not taking his eyes off Dean’s mouth. “I know what you mean. You have no idea—everything coalesces around you.”

Dean couldn’t swallow, throat gone dry. “But why _her_ , Cas. I mean, believe me, I get it, I do: I don’t have a fucking leg to stand on. But it’s just, after what she tried to do to Gabriel—that whole fucking apocalypse pre-game shit-show—”

Cas continued as if Dean hadn’t spoken, gaze unblinking. “When you walk into a room it’s as if all the objects in it _organize_ themselves with you as their center. It’s always been that way for me: hard to pay attention to anyone else, when you’re the focal length at which everything becomes clear.”

Dean closed his eyes and saw very clearly that he was setting himself up for an entire existence, possibly into the next life too, of never winning a single argument ever. He accepted this fate, leaned into it. It was worth it, because now he was here.

At which Cas, somehow still a wily mind-reader, drew even closer, inserting one of his knees between both of Dean’s, their foreheads touching. “Come here.”

“I'm here already,” Dean objected, though he couldn’t have said why he was disagreeing. His voice went hoarse.

“No, you’re not,—I mean _here_ ,” Cas ordered, pushing forward, and when his mouth found Dean’s again, everything got wet and dark and hot so fast that Dean just picked him up, absorbed in exploring their minute height difference, which hadn’t been apparent earlier when they were lying down. Cas just went with it, let Dean grab his ass and lift him up tight against Dean’s hips, so that he could finally take his time kissing him, bending that scant half-inch down and using it as leverage to deepen the kiss as aggressively as he wanted, blood singing through his whole body. And between Cas’s clutching at him, and feeling drunk on the warm salt-sweet taste of his mouth, Dean couldn’t have backed down from any of it, even if he’d wanted to try.

•

This time they hadn’t even made it to the bed. Dean came, hard and bright, his head thrown back and hands gripping the splintered railing behind him, with Cas’s mouth slick and perfect around him, Cas’s fingers digging into the back of his thighs.

After he caught his breath he shoved Cas inside, nearly ripping the screen door off its hinges, and finally did what he’d wanted to do all day, especially after Kali—barreled him down into the mattress and got his hands all over Cas, put his lips everywhere, did everything he could think of to make a total mess out of him, marked his skin and made him _his;_ then jerked him off, ruthless, deliberate, sloppy and viciously slow, made Cas writhe and plead and cry out, a sound he thought he wouldn’t ever get tired of hearing: his name filling Cas’s mouth.

All but unable to move afterward, Cas let Dean pull him into his arms, curl tight behind him, draw him close and cross his arms over Cas’s chest. He let his lips trace words against the back of his neck, terrifying words he couldn’t bring himself to say aloud. _I’m not going anywhere, I’m never going anywhere, I’m here._

Dean woke first, thinking about dinner, feeling Cas twitch in his sleep.

He propped himself on an elbow, watching the dream chase itself in a circle behind Cas’s eyelids. If it were Sam, he would have known whether to wake him. As it was, he couldn’t tell—good or bad? nightmare, flashback, or running along the sand keeping pace with sandpipers, swimming in the Gulf as brown pelicans skimmed the crests? Bad dreams of hell, of being filled with Leviathan, bad dreams of Dean beating him until his vessel’s face was cut and swollen and bleeding?

He stretched, trying not to jar the mattress; Cas seemed as wiped out as Dean had felt when he arrived, and he looked every day of his (human) age, maybe from getting so much sun. The dark circles under his eyes looked permanent now, the crow’s feet Dean wanted to trace with his fingers. Instead he slipped the sheet up over Cas’s hips and slid off the bed in one careful movement.

Three times: really not an accident. Dean shook his head to clear it, but the fact that they had…(here he left a blank, unable to locate the verb)…the fact that _it_ had happened three _—four_ times (and was Cas using witchcraft, it hadn’t been like that since he was thirty) made it hard to ignore or work around its reality.

Just as he was trying to decide if he should have a feeling about this, and if so what, reality rolled over and squinted at him, still mostly asleep.

“Dean, I’m hungry,” is what Cas probably thought he was saying, but it came out blurred and accusatory, sounding like all one word.

Dean tried not to laugh. “Me too, which is why we’re going out, because some people are fucking grad students and have no food in the house.” He ignored his own double-entendre in favor of holding up his last clean Fed-impersonating shirt in one hand, and an offensively basic gray-striped necktie in the other, to illustrate the concept of dining in public. (The fact that he kept these as well as a suit and a couple pairs of jeans and, okay, maybe a few flannels and some t-shirts in Cas’s closet had no bearing whatsoever on anything.) “That place with the fish tacos sound okay?”

“It closed,” Cas said, frowning. “And it was my favorite. But there’s a new one.” He sat up and eyed Dean with interest as he buttoned his cuffs. “Are you getting dressed up for me?”

“You? Hardly,” Dean scoffed, flipping the tie into a practiced knot, mirror optional. “No, I’m hoping we’ll see Kali again, so gotta look my best. Because let me tell you, I’ve heard there’s nothing like an evil hot man-hating goddess if you really want to get in touch with your root chakra—hey!” Cas had come off the bed in a rush and tackled Dean around knee-height, so that they both landed more or less on the sofa, with Cas’s face more or less in his crotch.

“Don’t start shit you can’t finish,” he advised, and Cas sighed, stopped exploring the fly of Dean’s boxers and stood up, rubbing at his eyes with both fists, apparently unembarrassed about being nude and sporting a reasonably impressive semi. Dean wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get used to either one.

“If you’re dressing up for me, I’m getting dressed up too.”

“As long as you wear clothes, man. I’m guessing for you that’s probably pretty dressed up,” Dean said, trying not to stare and failing.

Cas’s gaze went suddenly speculative. Looking back later, Dean probably should have known what that meant, because Cas was a terrible liar, even with his face.

•

At least part of what it meant, apparently, was that “new taco place” translated to “seizure-inducing rainbow disco lights, drinks in colors not intended by nature, and dance music too loud for any conversation but the grinding kind.” Fortunately because it was the off-season, the place wasn’t crowded, although that sort of made the disco lights kind of sad, like an unattended prom.

And all that was really the least of it, thought Dean, downing as fast as possible a cocktail that looked like cough syrup and tasted like rubbing alcohol, and had “voodoo” in its name. Much worse was that Cas’s version of dressing up for him had included putting on a long multicolored skirt made of some expensive-seeming clingy fabric with white designs stamped all over it, and a (normal, thank god for small things) white button-down shirt. (Though he’d admittedly enjoyed feeling Cas up beneath the skirt at pretty much every stop sign on the drive downtown. There was something to be said for ease of access.) In some unspecified way, Cas’s outfit reminded Dean uncomfortably of four grim days he’d once spent in what had been, at the time, their future, and he made a mental note to talk to Cas about those days exactly never.

At present there was no talking at all, however, just being deafened by the music and drinking in tandem, with Cas’s hand wandering around under the table, his eyes all innocent, until he finally found Dean’s front pants pocket and hooked his first two fingers in it. It felt good, like he couldn’t not be touching Dean, like he needed him close all the time. Dean wanted to lean over and kiss him; he didn’t dare look at Cas, or he knew he would.

Fortunately just then the waiter (wearing a feather boa and a tight neon-yellow shirt with a crawdad on it, reading “IT’S MARDI GRAS, LET’S GO CRAY”) brought them a single giant platter of what looked like a couple dozen fried seafood tacos, with bowls of salsa and pickled carrots.

Cas’s hand swooped in and Dean blinked, a little cross-eyed, when a tortilla filled with purple cabbage and drizzled in mayonesa appeared about an inch from his nose. Without thinking he opened his mouth obediently, and, _okay, holy shit_ : from the look on Cas’s face, for whatever reason, he really got off on this.

So, Cas liked feeding Dean; Dean liked food. _No problem here_ , he thought, as Cas, expression serious, caught a drip of guacamole taquero at the corner of Dean’s mouth with his thumb and licked it off. He watched, amused, as Cas, concentrating gravely as if the fate of heaven depended on it, arranged pico de gallo on a shrimp taco, even though some drum-and-bass version of “Macho Man” was playing at top volume and Dean was perfectly capable of putting salsa on his own tacos.

This time Dean couldn’t stop himself from tarting it up just a little, letting his eyelashes flutter shut and sucking Cas’s fingertips into his mouth along with the last bite, just to fuck with him. Grinning, he opened his eyes expecting to see that same absorbed expression only more so; but instead there was Kali, because Dean’s life was terrible.

This time, though, she had her arm wrapped around a smaller, curvier, younger woman, also objectively jaw-droppingly stunning, both of them wearing hardly anything at all (fine, Dean was officially old: strapless dresses seemed skimpy to him in January, even if it had been in the upper sixties all day) and smiling those ultraviolet-white club smiles and their skin somehow glowing in the dark, everything about them radiant and flawless and, well, godly.

Cas stood up, napkin falling to the floor, so he and Kali, or Sara or whatever, could shout more intimately while Dean and the other woman were polite in each other’s general direction, Dean with his mouth still full of taco. After a lot of back-and-forth yelling, Cas bent down and managed to make Dean understand that this was Kali’s girlfriend Aphrodite (or possibly vague-family-relationship-unspecified but apparently romantic at the present time, Dean had no idea and frankly didn’t want one), who, in order to stay undercover, went by Original Cindy, which Dean thought was pretty rank-and-file; but then he himself had just had a former commander of Heaven’s garrison wiping guacamole off his chin, so he couldn’t be too righteous about higher-order beings slumming it with the great primate unwashed.

What he _could_ be righteously indignant about: both goddesses tugging Cas out onto the dance floor. Cas managed to give him an over-the-shoulder apologetic look before he disappeared between the two of them and behind the few other couples who had started braving the seizure lights.

Fine. Great. No one had tried to drag _him_ out to dance, not that he would have gone, because dancing was dumb if you weren’t divine or immortal or whatever. Or maybe just sufficiently drunk. As a means to that end, Dean wasted no time in conveying to the waiter that he wanted a bourbon double neat and just leave the bottle please. He could put self-pity on his own goddamn tacos.

Why the hell was everyone so excited, anyway; Mardi Gras wasn’t even until March. But on the coast it supplanted Christmas immediately, the way Christmas now took over retail the morning after Halloween, without interval; Cas had told him all the stores were filled with purple, green, and gold strings of beads and wreaths and trees, and sugary cakes with plastic baby Jesus inside.

Dean was well into his third self-serve double when whatever wordless techno nonsense had been playing morphed into “[Blue Monday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJZTfl3DmCU),” and then his attempts at indifference mostly broke into pieces; his stomach seemed to crawl up under his jaw and try to close off his throat. Cindy and Sara and Cas drifted back into view, the angel he’d never deserved enclosed between their bodies as if they were his own personal gorgeous parentheses, the three of them curved together inside the music like a standing wave, Cas’s head tilted back and his eyes shut and actual _goddesses_ plastered against him, holding hands on either side of him—

—and suddenly it was the 2014 that never happened, and all over again Dean saw his best friend cross-legged on the floor, almost too stoned to move, smiling vague and grateful up at his incipient orgy partners, clearly just relieved to be numb and blotted the fuck out of his mind, and Jesus Christ how had Dean just let him go like that, let him _fall_ , what did _he_ have that could ever compare to, to—what had he been thinking, even for a fucking _second_ , that Cas could—why had he thought that, why had he let himself _think_ —Cas was an _angel_ for chrissake, he needed someone on his level, not a human and not this human, this one with scar-thickened hands who woke up hurting somewhere every morning before a belt of whiskey, with his sordid fucked-up history of slaughter—this one, just like his dad, capable of slamming back an entire fifth without so much as feeling it the next day, but incapable of communicating verbally, instead of doing so through punches and glares—

Dean looked down to see his cocktail napkin all damp and shredded in his lap. He tried to pick at the chips and salsa, but they stuck in his throat and he settled for doing another shot. He didn’t want to admit to knowing the words, but he’d been through his post-punk CBGB period; he’d had the secret hard-on for Ian Curtis, and now Cindy and Sara were making out slightly to one side of Cas, still dancing, his arm slung around them, hips glued to Cindy’s, and Dean could see his lips moving.

 _I see a ship in the harbor_  
_I can and shall obey_  
_but if it wasn't for your misfortunes_  
_I’d be a heavenly person today_

That time he and Dad, in Tacoma in a nasty cold rain, had killed some piece-of-shit monster they couldn’t even recognize: the hard way, basically hacking it to pieces back and forth between them until they were covered in gore, all their clothes ruined, and then the goddamn thing’s heart hadn’t burned. Dean still sometimes dreamed about his dad kicking aside the embers and ashes to take it up in his hand, not even hot, a charred cold lump of meat, and telling Dean to go wait in the car. He never knew how Dad had gotten rid of the thing and he hadn’t asked, but he could feel his own heart in his chest like that, right now—clammy and tough with scar-tissue, frigid, gristly.

Nauseated, Dean half-stood, lights swirling around him, to slide out of the booth and weave seasick toward the door: _Cas, come on, man—you know it’s a mistake, it’s really not me you need, we both know this. I’m forty, I’m a fucking bottom feeder, I’ll never even have a job besides working scams with Charlie and worst of all I’m scared to do this because I know who I am and I’m_ nothing, _you can’t want me, not like this. You got the wrong guy. You’re thinking of some kid who saved the day in a cemetery once just by being young and dumb and arrogant, and he wasn’t anything much to start with—plus I’m not even that guy anymore, not even young and arrogant, the only thing I got left now is just dumb—_

“Bad taco?” asked the waiter, concerned, holding out a cloth napkin.

Dean realized he was outside and leaning against the side of the building like someone about to lose his liquor. He tried to laugh it off but apparently still had the wrong look on his face, because the waiter took a tentative step back. “No, thanks, man. Um, ma’am. I mean—I’m mean, I’m fine. But thanks.”

The waiter kept holding out the napkin insistently, shifting from foot to foot, feather boa ruffling in the sea air. “My pronouns are they/them, and it’s got ice wrapped in it, you should take it, besides my hand is getting cold.”

 _I’ve lived too long_ , Dean thought, despairing, _I don’t even know how to speak English anymore_. He finally took the napkin and held it in one hand, uncertain. _What I got, they don’t make napkins for._ What he really wished is that he’d brought the bottle of bourbon outside with him. “So you’re…like, gender-neutral?”

The waiter nodded. “I prefer nonbinary, but close enough. Name’s Avery.”

“Dean,” he managed, shifting the napkin so he could shake Avery’s hand. “I’m—we’re—” he waved back in the general direction of the taco nightclub, which he now realized had no sign and therefore he couldn’t call it by its name.

“You came in with Cas,” Avery offered, “and we don’t actually have any food on the menu, but Smooth Tony’s does, so we always get his fish tacos from there. They’re the best in town, I’m sorry if they’re what’s causing, you know.”

Dean tried to smile, this time with more conviction, and sat down on the curb. Seawall Boulevard was quiet; not a car in sight, and even if there had been, the club was set well back from the oncoming lanes. He had no idea what time it was, but surely coming up on midnight. “Nah, I’m fine. It’s more of an, um, an upcoming birthday with a zero in it, kind of a thing.”

Avery sat down next to him and shook out a pack of cigarettes; Dean took one from them almost without noticing, despite his queasiness. They were young, with a shock of dirty blonde hair in a pixie cut and a lot of piercings, but an untroubled face that Dean instinctively trusted.

“Sure, birthdays happen, and getting old sucks. But it’s good to stay alive long enough to have them, right? And to have them with a friend, someone like Cas.”

Dean used Avery’s lighter, then held it in his hand a moment too long, flicking it on and off, thinking fond thoughts of Sam and gravesites before he handed it hastily back. “Yeah, about Cas…let’s just say he’s put up with a lot from me over the years.”

Avery looked unimpressed. “Well, he’s no beautiful cinnamon roll too pure for this world, if you know what I mean.”

Dean didn’t, but he wasn’t about to admit it; plus actually Cas was _exactly_ that: way too good for him if not the rest of the world. “He is, though,” he blurted out anyway, and here he went again, dumping his shit on some poor kid who had better stuff to worry about, like being nonbinary in a world that tried to force them to pick a gender, but he kept going—“You got no idea, he’s, he’s literally too good for me. I don’t just mean with the helping animals thing—” Oh god, he should shut _right_ the fuck up.

Avery took a drag off their cigarette and smiled at Dean anyway. It was a nice smile, crooked and hopeful and friendly. Dean wanted nice things to happen to them: no monsters, no demons, no dick angels, no bigots.

“It must be hard for you,” he started, and Avery shook their head.

“Nope, not tonight. This is you, Dean. So look: you know and I know it, Cas is dead sexy. But he knows it too, and it’s bad when they know it, ‘cause then they think they’ve got you, and you have to remember you’re worth getting. Keep him humble. He’s really no angel.” (Dean managed to turn his involuntary sound into a convincing cough.) “Like, I’ve seen him _completely_ flip his shit. Mostly at terrible pet owners, but. He thinks he’s some BAMF but he can throw a hell of a tantrum—dude can be seriously bitchy even on good days.”

Dean crushed his cigarette butt with his boot heel, having dragged the tobacco straight down, perversely savoring the painful burn in his lungs. “Oh believe me, I know—I’ve seen him more than once…yeah. Flip his shit.” He closed his eyes for a second, reviewing the playbacks, mostly of Cas scrunching up his face and then smiting the white-light ever-loving fuck out of entire battalions of demons, most of whom had never even known what hit them. “What’s a BAMF?”

“Badass motherfucker,” said Cas from behind them, scooting right in between and handing Dean the bottle of Four Roses, which Dean perversely now no longer wanted because Cas was trying to give it to him. Also he had Cas pressed up against his side. “Which I am. Well, was. Now I’m mostly badass when it comes to hand antisepsis and surgical hygienic standards. Also cockfighting.”

Avery and Cas started laughing, all but leaning on each other as Cas struggled to open the bourbon, complaining, “Why does it have a cork anyway?”

Dean took it away from him, scowling and trying not to melt, snapping, “Because it’s classy, badass motherfucker. What’s so funny about torturing roosters?”

“No, it’s not—” “You had to have—” Avery and Cas both said at the same time, and then paused at the same time, waiting for the other to start again; and then, obviously, both started laughing again.

Dean uncorked the bottle and took a quick burning swallow, not really willing to admit quite how reassuring it was to have it tucked under his arm, there to help him weather moments when Cas’s attention went altogether elsewhere and all his self-doubts and terrors flooded right back in. It occurred to him to wonder where Sara and Cindy were, and then occurred to him they were probably—

“Making out in the kissing lounge,” Cas said, sotto voce, hand just brushing against Dean’s rolled-up sleeve.

Dean looked at him in disbelief. “They have one of those? In there? And we’re not in it?”

“I didn’t think you’d be intere—”

“So okay,” Avery started up, so tickled they were squeaking. “So I volunteer at the kill shelter, right? In the same surgery where Cas started out. We mostly do just a shit-ton of spays and neuters, especially during kitten season.”

Cas nodded, absently reaching for Dean’s bottle. “It’s fairly gruesome. Basically field surgery—no catheters, no anesthetic, just on the table and off again as fast as we can do it.”

Dean turned to look at him, aghast. “That sounds…dude, that sounds like a fucking nightmare.” _It literally sounds like hell._

“It’s so much fun,” enthused Avery, and Cas nodded agreement. “We play the classic rock station really loud, and whenever one of the ferals wakes up too soon, the vets start screaming _Cat awake!_ and we get to chase it around.”

Cas squeezed Dean’s knee, watching his face, and explained. “It’s actually for their good, Dean. The more animals we can spay and neuter, the better chance they have of being adopted rather than euthanized. I often take the smaller ones home for a night or two, if they’re not doing well after surgery.”

Dean still couldn’t look at him. Avery went on. “Anyway, Cas finds out about this cockfighting ring from one of the kennel technicians.”

“Our informant, Porfirio Vasquez,” Cas said, holding out a hand to Avery, who shook out a cigarette into it, already laughing at whatever the punch line was going to be. “Whose asshole boss was holding fights on his ranch every night after the hands left the property, in a truly _terrifying_ blood-spattered barn—”

“And Cas calls it in, so him and half the sheriff’s office, they all show up that night, and he _blasts_ into the barn—” (Dean had no problem picturing this part) “—with flashlights, and _sirens_ , and obviously I wasn’t there but Cas is famous for this all over fucking town, he goes…” Avery paused dramatically.

“‘We’re here about the cock ring,’” Cas intoned, which was so obviously a Cas thing to say; followed by a half-beat before Dean looked to Avery in disbelief and said, “No.”

“Oh _yes_ ,” said Avery. “Oh yes he did. And the best part is: next morning when I get into the shelter, all the cat cages are full. Of sixty-seven _totally_ pissed-off and violent roosters just _screaming_ at each other. And one super-confused hen.”

“I always wonder how she performed in the ring,” Cas mused.

“The cock ring, you mean?” Dean couldn’t help himself. Cas turned his head very slowly to look at him, and it was as if they both realized at the same moment: they could flirt in front of other people and _no one would ever know_.

“You…should show me some respect.”

“So I hear. All over fucking town, in fact. Something about the size of the Chrysler Building? Is that with or without the cock ring?”

“Depends on whether I’m with someone into…role play and light domination.”

“Have you… _interrogated_ the cats?”

“I don’t know: do you still breed with the mouth of a goat?”

“Only when I’m”—here Dean made pointed air quotes— _“on a bender.”_

Avery stood up, dusting off the seat of their uniform and clearing their throat. “Right, so…my work here is obviously done. Have a good night, guys. Don’t forget to pay the—” Cas fumbled his wallet, not taking his eyes off Dean’s face, and handed them a fifty. “Got it, thanks. And hey—happy birthday, Dean.”

Dean stood up too, then, and wound up hugging Avery which was a little awkward as they were taller than he was; it was confusing in the same way Sam’s towering over him still threw him for a loop, because in his head Sam would always be four feet high and barely reach up to his pockets. “Take care,—you. See you around.” Avery snorted once, then patted Dean on the back as if he were the younger sibling, and loped back into the taco-bar-dancehall. Which apparently had a kissing lounge. Kids these days.

Dean turned back around and came unexpectedly nose-to-nose with Cas, who’d done that soundless-moving thing he still did, and was close. Like, really close. Cas’s hand flashed out and he caught Dean by the arm, face severe. So apparently now they were going to have the fight. That coldness came back into his chest, like his heart was a lump of scarred tissue and couldn’t beat properly. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t.

“Where were you going, Dean. When you left me in there.”

“I don’t know,” Dean said honestly. “Just away. I don’t—Cas, you can do better than me, okay. A lot better. Deity-levels of better. You have to know that.”

Cas’s eyes narrowed and his jaw took on that stubborn underbite Dean knew so well, speaking of fucking shit up. “I thought we were past this conversation. I don’t want whatever it is you _think_ I should have. I don’t want…whoever it is you think would be better for me than you are, because who I want is _you_.”

“Yeah, I know—I know you think you do,” Dean argued, taking a step toward Cas, wondering in the back of his head why he wasn’t moving away. “But that person, okay, the one you want, the one you—you maybe fell in love with?” It was hard to say that word, so he moved on quickly. “That guy, that’s not me, not anymore. I’m not anything special, not some righteous man you were built to save the world with. You were wrong about that. About us being…for each other. About me.” He swallowed once, hard; made himself keep going.

“Take a real close look at the goods before you buy, okay: I’m unemployed. I have no skills, no money, no home except a freaky underground _museum_ in the middle of a corn field, and we still don’t even know where the utilities come from. I live there with my fake kid sister because she feels sorry for me, and I see my brother twice a year; mostly I think he visits to make sure I haven’t drowned in the bathtub like a burnt-out rockstar. I don’t even hunt anymore, man—I just answer phones. I wake up hurting all over every morning, when I don’t wake up from nightmares. And I’m about to turn forty, and I’ve never been in a long-term relationship, anyway not one the other person remembers.”

Cas didn’t take his eyes from Dean’s face, where he was doing that old-school thing of boring holes through Dean with his gaze. “You may have the particulars right in some of those details; but your interpretations of events are biased and markedly unfair to yourself, and therefore essentially untrue.”

“Really?” said Dean. He’d started shaking underneath his fake-FBI shirt and jacket, whether from cold or anger or fear or what, he didn’t know. Cas’s fingers dug into his bicep as he felt himself pull back automatically. “Are you sure? Because you can’t see yourself, Cas. I can. You didn’t see what you looked like, just now, dancing with them. You should be—you deserve to be—fuck, I can’t do this, man, I never could,” and now he did yank his arm away. It would be easier if he did it fast, and didn’t let Cas touch him, because that made it harder to breathe or think straight. “I have to go. I’m going.”

 _This was a mistake_ , he thought but couldn’t say; _I’m a mistake._

Cas took a step forward, as if involuntarily, but Dean stayed out of his reach, head suddenly spinning. “You were right to leave the bunker, okay. You were right to get away from us—from me. You had the right idea, Cas, now stick to it. Go study dolphins or toxic blooms or whatever, go to California or Australia, take Cindy and, and Sara. You should _go._ And stay away—don’t ever come back to fucking Kansas.”

Cas looked down at his own empty palm as if trying to figure out why Dean’s hand wasn’t still in his; one by one his fingers curled up into a fist, closing over nothing, and Dean could see the moment when he finally started to get it. “No,” he said, his voice low and anguished, eyes swimming. “Dean, no. I won’t let you. You said—”

 _“I know what I fucking said, okay_?” he shouted—if he could stay angry and mean this would be over quicker, it would hurt Cas less. “Just—trust me, I know it’s hard, but trust me. Just one more time. Just this last time,” Dean said, and now he knew he was begging but he didn’t care; for a second he thought he might grab Cas by both shoulders and shake him, but only a little, only to make him understand.

He’d seen Cas’s eyes well up but had never seen tears spill over onto his cheekbones, had never actually seen him cry. He hoped he never had to see it again. Cas didn’t even try to hide it, cried hard for an endless minute, grabbing onto Dean’s shirt front and Dean just let him, so numb he felt anesthetized.

Finally Cas gulped, struggling to catch his breath, and looked up at Dean in disbelief. “This can’t be happening—I was there, I felt you—it’s not real. You’re not doing this. Not after we—Dean, just no. Not after that. You _let_ me.”

Dean heard himself automatically turn words into sentences he’d said before, familiar lies, but they’d never felt like sandpaper. “You’ll be okay, I promise. It gets better, it just—hurts for a while, at first, all right? But you’ll be glad I did it, eventually. It’ll get better. You’ll be better off, without this. Without me.”

Cas suddenly let go of Dean’s shirt and shoved him backward, switching to lethally angry, which Dean knew was, okay, more than a little scary from his perspective, but probably good for Cas. What he needed to get through this. “Dean Winchester,” he snapped, “you do not get to decide this for me.”

Dean closed his eyes at that and turned his face aside, slinging off tears with one hand, trying to wipe it all away, everything, in the same motion. “Yeah, actually, Cas, I do. I do get to decide this. And I have to leave now, before I don’t.”

He took a step back, then another, about to turn before realizing the Impala was parked a couple blocks over and he couldn’t leave Cas to walk the five miles back to his place in the dark, alone, in _January_ , along the freezing-cold coastline with his heart broken. But he knew Cas wasn’t going to accept a ride, either, and he sure wasn’t going to stand there in the beach house watching while Dean packed his duffel and left.

Compared to forty-something years in hell, and another roughly equivalent number of years on earth, Dean ranked this moment hands-down the worst. The thought of driving in the opposite direction, away from Cas, felt like pulling out his own liver, slowly, through his nostrils, for one of Sekhmet’s fucking canopic jars.

On the other hand, to try to stay with Cas, and have to see, over and over, every day, all the ways that he had been the one responsible for grounding him, limiting all that feathered glory to one worse-than-mediocre, all-too-human partner? He didn’t want Cas to have to wake up next to his sorry mundane ass morning after morning, as Dean kept aging, getting more and more useless, growing more into what he was, and less and less of what Cas deserved.

Cas’s eyes were wild now and he was breathing hard, harder than when he’d come back that morning from his run, which already seemed like an infinity ago. It occurred to Dean that if Cas really had been the one to break it off with Kali, as she said, he’d maybe never been on the receiving end of the process. Which, even given that it was for Cas’s own good, he knew it felt like being gutshot.

“Come on, babe. Let me take you home,” he entreated, reaching out a hand.

Cas pulled back, almost snarling. “You don’t get to do this and call me that.”

Dean dropped his head, wondering if he were about to puke after all. “You’re right. Just—let me give you a ride. It’s—it’s cold, it’s not safe, you could—”

Cas cut him off, and even human he could still turn his voice into blue-white frost. “Dean, I predate this island by several millennia. The hurricane in 1900 which killed almost ten thousand people—did you think that was a freak accident, an act of nature? Did you ever stop to consider that the entire garrison was here, along with every reaper we had, to harvest those souls? And that tonight the greatest danger to me, aside from you—” (okay, Dean fully deserved that) “—is probably a drunk driver, a category into which, as it happens, you also now fall.” (He deserved that too, clutching his bottle miserably.)

“I am fully capable,” Cas concluded,—and Dean knew him well enough to know he was keeping pain at bay with old-school Cas, all that elevated vocabulary and excessively precise syntax,—“of walking, or for that matter running, to my home alone, where at least I—” here his voice broke, and he looked up at Dean, stricken, before he hardened his mouth into a line again. “Am not unwanted.”

Dean felt like he’d just murdered a puppy and buried it in the dunes. Christ, he was even beautiful with tear-stained face and reddened eyes. “Cas—”

But in a curious reversal of roles, Cas had already shoved past him and was stalking off down Seawall, the wind whipping his…sarong, Dean’s brain finally supplied, arms wrapped protectively around himself, sand ghosting across the pavement in drifts and gusts like snow; and Dean was left to stand there with a half-empty fifth of bourbon, feeling utterly abandoned, with the strange sense that Castiel had just broken up with him, rather than the other way around.

•

Dean threw back the rest of the liquor, crossed Seawall, and slung the empty into a fifty-gallon trash can on the beach. It bounced a couple times on the metal, but didn’t break. Short of hitting himself over the head with the bottle, he felt that was the best use to which it probably could be put, before he drove off in an uneven squeal of tires to get back to the beach house ahead of Cas.

Once there, he shoved everything blindly into the duffel, more so that Cas wouldn’t have to see reminders of him than because he wanted any of it. From decades of experience he could clean out a motel room in seconds; this wasn’t any different, he told himself, just get back in the Impala and on Broadway headed toward I-45 before Cas got back and had to watch him leave. He left a light turned on behind him; didn’t leave a note; what would it even have said.

And made it almost to 61st Street before he pulled over to throw up behind the car, leaning against it with one hand, the arc of bourbon clear in the tail lights.

Back inside, shaky, he pulled over to a gas station parking lot to call Charlie, holding his hands against the heating vents in a doomed effort to feel them. The Impala didn’t warm up easily these days; he’d be cold until Houston. Maybe she knew how you got back from the ledge, how to reverse the fall. Dean felt like a cartoon character windmilling in midair. Charlie was good with this kind of thing, with words; she would know, he thought muzzily, what to do next.

Charlie picked up almost before it had a chance to ring. “Oh my god, Dean, he’s been trying to call you for _two hours,_ where the actual fuck—”

Dean felt his face with one hand. “That—Charlie, that can’t be right, I only just left.”

Charlie didn’t even pause for breath “—have you been, where’s Cas, what the fuck, were you and Cas ever going to—”

“We did, okay? We finally did—but I already left, Charlie.” He gave up on the Impala’s heater, put the phone on speaker, and stuffed both hands inside his coat under his arms, shivering. “And I think I love him—I mean I know I do, I’m not just saying it ‘cause I’m drunk. But I am, I mean I am kind of drunk, and I already fucked it up, so I left.”

“Dean, what are you _talking about?_ Did you two really—no, no, wait, hang on—what about Sam? because he’s, we have to, it’s _Sam_ —”

He dropped his head down onto the steering wheel and beat it softly against the hard edge several times, a movement which generally soothed him when he was upset, but tonight did nothing but make his forehead sore. “Okay, first of all, kid, I need you to calm down. Second of all, oh my god do _not_ get Sam. We’re leaving him _out_ of this for now, understood?”

Dean could hear flapping sounds in the background as if Charlie were just running around the room in circles, which he thought in fact might actually be true. “Okay, I just—but see I just, the thing is, actually, oh _shit_ —Dean, the reason I picked up so fast, and I’m freaking the fuck out, it’s _not_ about you guys, although don’t get me wrong, you and Cas, that’s really, um—but it’s—I thought you were calling about the hunt! There’s a _hunt_ , and I just—”

Everything got clear and still and hyperfocused. Dean had almost forgotten he could do that. He started the car again.

“Charlie! Okay, okay I get it. You gotta settle down now and tell me what's happening.” He paused and winced, favoring one side of his pounding head. “Don't get all detailed on me here, babygirl, just one sentence: What’s going on?”

There was a pause and then her breath came out all in a single rattling rush: “Sam found a hunt in Baton Rouge and he drove down and we’ve both been trying to call you all night because it’s _way_ worse than he thought but you didn’t answer and neither did Cas, and now it’s been two hours and I—”

“Nope, that’s it—that’s enough, hold it right there, Queen C. Let me call Sam and get back to you, okay?”

“Yes but _you have to_ _hurry_ , Dean, I don’t even know what he’s—”

His voice sounded so calm he surprised even himself, as he swung from the parking lot out into traffic headed north. “Baby and I are right this second headed straight for the I-10. Now let me hang up and get hold of Sam, see what’s going on. I’ll call you back once I’m on the interstate.”

Charlie’s breath caught in what sounded like a sob. “Oh god, okay. Okay, I—”

Dean ended the call before she could launch into any questions about him and Cas, either their being together or Dean breaking up with him.

(Could it even be a breakup when the being-together part had barely lasted twenty-four hours?) (But before then had been years, so many years, those had to count for something—)

That breath-stealing hurt started welling up inside his chest again, sour as vomit, with jagged stabs of pain; but out of long practice Dean forced all the questions into a lump and shoved them down somewhere underneath his diaphragm. They could wait. This thing with Cas, what he’d done; it could wait. A hunt couldn’t. He thumbed through the missed calls: five, evenly spaced, about one every half-hour. Four from Sammy, and the last number was one he didn’t recognize.

“This,” he informed the Impala, “is fucked. This is us getting fucked every direction from Christmas, and I don’t mean in…in the fun way.” (Was there a fun way? He’d probably never know, now.) _This is us being at least_ —he looked at his GPS app— _four hours and thirty-two fucking minutes late, unless we break the speed limit. And sober up fast. And unless Sam is still conscious and able to cast spells and pick locks and just generally be stupidly taller than whatever the fuck it is he decided to hunt alone_. He couldn’t do anything about the last one—the last two, really. But he could drive.

“Let’s get going, darlin’,” he said, brushing his fingers softly across the dash out of long habit. He flicked on his brights and jammed the needle up against the far right of the speedometer, until the usual roar of her engine sounded more like an airplane taking off, and then Dean let everything, everything, everything fall away but the wide section of blacktop right in front of them, bisected with its yellow center stripe, lit up only just as far as he could see by her headlights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear gentle reader, this is the dark hour before the dawn, so don't worry: the story doesn't end this way, just because Dean Winchester is a bonehead. Thanks again to Betts for being a brutal line-editor; just how I like 'em. 
> 
> (Also: fashion notes! Here are [Kali's trainers](http://www.hockeymonkey.com/nike-hockey-footwear-free-5-0-laq-lrt-ggl-wmn.html) and [Castiel's sarong](https://www.etsy.com/listing/104415635/sarong-pareo-beach-sarong-mint-green?ref=usr_faveitems).)


	3. Chapter 3

Dean made record time to Baton Rouge, only having to stop once more to throw up again (blowing his nose with his hand, trying not to gag, mopping tears off his face with his sleeve), and then to get gas and coffee just outside of Lake Charles.

He couldn’t get an answer from Sam, which was terrifying. He tried calling Cas twice, stomach roiling, but he wasn’t picking up, no surprise there; and Dean didn’t want to keep bugging Charlie for updates in case she was acting as mission control for Sam. He didn’t call the unrecognized number. Better to walk into the trap without announcing his entrance to whatever fucked-up supernatural thing had set it for him.

He texted Charlie for the address just after he’d crossed the seedy-looking river, then turned off onto the 110 and drove past the place a couple times: just an average fucked-up-looking club, the fugly concrete-block kind with no windows.

After a couple more useless drive-bys, Dean turned off Baby’s lights and coasted to a stop on an empty side street. The total absence of parked cars unnerved him. His phone said it was a little after three in the morning, but the parking lot was empty—you’d think some drunks would have left their cars for the night. Did people still call cabs? Didn’t everyone take Uber these days? Was Baton Rouge so backwoods it didn’t even have Uber? He gave up and called Charlie.

She picked up breathlessly in mid-sentence like they hadn’t stopped talking: “—patrol units, which is why Sam’s around the back now, there’s a set of stairs leading down, and a metal door—”

“Charlie, wait,” he interrupted, “do you know anything about what kind of thing we talking about here? Is this a vamp nest, or djinn, or what,—what did Sam tell you? I need to know what it is and how many there are, if I’m gonna kill it.”

He had the trunk open by this point and was shoving the long knife into his other boot and Sam’s little Beretta into the back of his jeans; checked the .45 in his shoulder holster, then stood there debating between a coil of rope and a set of handcuffs, finally shoving the latter into his back pocket. He felt cold prickles up the back of his neck from the base of his spine. “Fuck—do I need to sneak in or can I just bust down the door? Do they have Sam? Do they have _teeth?”_

Charlie hesitated and Dean made a face which fortunately she couldn’t see. “Actually? Actually I think…Dean, you’re gonna be mad, but I think it’s all over but the shouting. Actually I don’t think there ever even _was_ any shouting. Just go find them—it’s, I think they got it covered. They’ll need help with the clean-up, though. They’re around back.”

 _They_ , thought Dean with annoyance. The only thing worse than Sammy thinking he could just sprint back into the game would be him working with _other hunters_. 

He tossed the rope back into the trunk and came out with a shotgun just in case, chambering a round with his right hand while closing the trunk as quietly as possible with his left. If there were other hunters, he’d show them how it’s really done.

And sure enough. Dean flattened himself up against the side of the building, shoulders pressed tight to the concrete, and came around the corner with both barrels pointed at—his _brother_ , who took an involuntary step backward into—

—Castiel, who was wiping some horrible-looking blood off his angel blade with a red garage rag; casually, as if he had just finished using it as a dipstick to check the oil level.

Dean hated them both.

•

He said a lot of bad words in a row before pulling Sam into his chest and closing his eyes in relief. Sam smelled sweaty and gross but wasn’t apparently injured in any way except for ugly-looking rope burns on both wrists, which meant Dean could yell at him, which he proceeded to do—while continuing to paw all over him looking for cuts or bruises as he cursed, making sure any blood he found on Sam’s stupid college-boy sweater wasn’t actually his. (He could scream at Cas later, after he’d put away that worthless fucking toy _toothpick_ he still called a sword.)

“What the _fuck_ , Sammy, you think you can just jump back into shit after, what, how many years out of it? Do you even work out, do you even go to the firing range, do you even _own a gun_ , I could just about kill you myself if—”

Cas interrupted him coolly, and Dean actually had to shut his eyes not to punch him, because at some point he’d changed from his inane dance-with-sexy-goddesses skirt into dark jeans and a leather jacket, and he looked dangerous and hot, and Dean couldn’t stand his beautiful face.

“Sam had escaped and was fighting again by the time I got here, unsurprisingly, since I was unable to go any faster.” He gestured behind him and Dean had to drop his palm from his face and open his eyes again to see what it was: a Royal Enfield, in flawless, near-mint condition. Cas scuffed at the dirt with a casual boot heel and Dean said more bad words, not all inside his head.

“Since when do you have a _motorcycle_ ,” he finally gritted out, and Cas looked at him without expression.

“It belongs to Cindy. Someone took off before I could get a ride with him,” Cas said, with that deceptive softness that meant he was absolutely livid; but Dean was just as pissed, and started toward him, hands clenched, without a clear plan.

“And you beat me here—with no helmet? I made it in three hours—Jesus, Cas, how fucking fast were you going? You act like you’re still topped up with grace, like it’s some kinda antifreeze and blue light is gonna magically seal you up if you spring a leak, but what if you’d spun out on the _bridge_ —” and here Dean felt himself really start to lose it, thinking of how far down it was to the Atchafalaya, and how many alligators, and cottonmouths, and how dark—“what if you took a whipper and left your skin all over the asphalt? One wrong move and your face would be spaghetti, and then what, how do you think that would—” He forced himself to stop, realizing he just sounded strangled, shocked and afraid.

“Um, Dean?” Sam had pulled off his top layers and was using his t-shirt to wipe sweat and something’s blood off his face. “Could we maybe get out of here before you go all John Winchester? Look, I tried to call you—it just wasn’t the milk-run I thought it would be. And Cas saved both our asses, okay?”

Dean realized he was maybe an entire inch away from Cas, who’d narrowed his eyes and had his arms crossed over his chest, in a pugnacious gesture at once familiar and now different. Instead of business casual he was in the ragged, cracked black leather bomber that he’d found at the bunker and refused to give up, despite Dean’s insisting that it was sixty years old and they could afford a new jacket for him. Dean suspected he slept in it. Suddenly he wondered what it smelled like. He was almost close enough to—

He backed off and turned to face Sam. “So what piece-of-shit monster was it this time, that you thought it was worth taking your life into your hands for?”

Sam sniffed his sweater and then wadded it up and threw it as far away as he could, into the darkness over by a chain-link fence. He slid his button-up back on but left it open, shoving his t-shirt into his rear jeans pocket next to, Dean was secretly glad to see, Dad’s old Desert Eagle. He raked his hands through his hair and laughed. Dean, incensed, realized Sam had been having _fun._

He even smiled at him, the bastard. (Dean felt faint with relief.) “No idea. I can’t wait to tell you the whole story, dude, I promise; but maybe first we could just deal with these bodies, and find a motel with hot water and some beer?”

Which is how the three of them wound up taking two cars with four bodies of—Dean didn’t even know what the fuck they were, they seemed to be a kind of shifter, and disintegrating rapidly—into a heavily wooded area well outside of town. In the end they just dumped what was left into a gully rather than digging a grave, because no one had brought any shovels anyway. Dean only had one five-gallon can of gas but Sam had remembered the salt, and with some dried-out vines and branches they eventually made everything burn, sending Cas ahead of them to scout out a motel.

After they’d thrown enough wet branches over the ashes, Dean followed Sam’s dumbass Toyota back into town, not even minding that Sam stayed under the speed limit, just grateful he wasn’t in the passenger seat, asking questions Dean might not be able to answer. The less time he had to talk to him, the better. Except he’d missed Sam, even missed being worried as shit about him.

Cas texted the address of the motel, which was for a change only marginally disgusting and in an only semi-sketchy part of town. He was already in the room when they got there, back turned to the door, either pretending to study the phone book, or maybe he really was going to order pizza at like five a.m. He didn’t turn around as Dean and Sam immediately began their methodical strip-down of muddy clothes, unholstered weapons, kicked-off boots.

It was just like old times; Dean’s knees hurt, he desperately wanted to touch Cas and he couldn’t, and the beer wasn’t anywhere near cold. He wondered if Cas had bought warm IPA on purpose, just to be a dick.

•

Also like old times: Sam, who had what turned out to be some kind of monster slobber in his hair, got dibs on the shower (“Dude, I don’t know what they were, other than pissed off—they just would not go down. Until Cas got their alpha, then they all kind of—imploded, really messily”).

Was it morning? A raw pink light like daybreak had started to leach through the vinyl-backed motel curtains. As soon as the water started running, Dean barged up to Cas, irrationally enraged all over again. He jerked the phone book from Cas’s fingers, tossed it onto the nightstand so hard Sam’s beer bottle foamed over, and then dragged Cas to his feet, unresisting, eyes wide but not startled.

“Dammit, Cas, did you even stop to think for _one second_ what would have happened if you’d—if I—” He couldn’t even stand to think of Cas, human, fighting an alpha with nothing but his sword; but Cas was always averse to guns.

Cas recovered quickly, enough to laugh Dean’s least-favorite laugh (the Chitaqua one, the one with Cas speeding his brains out, every molecule of innocence just burned right out of him). Dean was already having a hard time not kissing him.

Cas yanked himself away, then turned his back to shrug out of the leather bomber and throw it down on one of the beds before flopping down after it. He sat propped against the headboard and took a long speculative pull off his beer, considering Dean with level gaze, probably very much the same way he’d looked at the alpha of the slime-blooded whatevers.

Cas finally answered, voice dripping with sarcasm. “I can’t wait to see where this is going. How acrobatic are you feeling, Dean? Are you doing a one-eighty or just a right angle? And how long is it going to last this time—just two nights, again? Or shall we try for three?”

The worst part was, he’d earned that; and Dean could tell that underneath all the verbal posturing, Cas felt stung. Dean closed his eyes in frustration and sat down heavily on the other bed, feeling it sag underneath him. There was no way he was going to be able to sleep with Cas in the same room, he realized, even if it was officially tomorrow and his brain felt abraded with exhaustion.

Back seat of the Impala, then. Not really a hardship; a familiar place, at least. More familiar than curled against Cas, listening to the surf. It hit him then, that stab, booming through his chest, threatening to wrench open his ribcage, that thought that had doubled him over with nausea: _what if I never get to hold him again._

 _Were you always this much of a dumbass, Winchester?_ He didn’t know if one of them had said that or just thought it really loudly.

“Yeah, okay,” he muttered, scrubbing both hands through his hair, “I had that coming. And a lot more besides. I know that, okay? Just, excuse me for wanting the guy I’m in fucking _love_ with not to get his fucking ass _killed_.”

There was a long silence, punctuated only by the rattle of the shower water against plastic curtains, and Dean’s breathing. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard, hoped he wasn’t going to cry. He realized his right rotator cuff felt like it was on fire and had for hours. When had he wrenched it? No idea.

There was a dip in the bed as Cas sat down beside him, not too close.

“…Dean.” No one but Cas could pack that much into a syllable.

He laughed a little, unhappily, under his breath, still not letting go of the bridge of his nose, which felt like it was keeping something inside from coming out. “Yeah, my timing is shitty, tell us something we both don’t know. I didn’t even make it off the island, man. That’s why I called Charlie. I was already _doing_ the one-eighty; I probably would have got back to the house before you did.”

Dean felt Cas’s hand slip up to his and gently pull it away from his face, holding it between both of his, which felt cool and dry and good. How was it possible that someone like this would throw his life away on someone like Dean—

“I meant it, though. I mean it, Cas.”

There was a long pause, but Cas didn’t let go of his hand. “Which part?”

Dean tried not to hold his breath. “You gonna make me say it?”

Cas unselfconsciously kissed the inside of Dean’s wrist, and Dean could feel his exhalation there, against the pulse, and his lips moving when he spoke. “So stay.”

“But how can you even—”

“Probably because I’ve been ‘in fucking love with’ you since hell,” and Dean smiled despite himself because he could still hear the air quotes.

Dean let himself drift a little to the right, just enough to tuck his burning shoulder behind Cas’s solid one and take some of the pressure off. He tried not to sigh, couldn’t stop it.

“Do you generally break up with people after barely two days, when you’re overwhelmingly in love with them?” Cas’s mouth moved lightly, carefully over Dean’s knuckles as he spoke and something stirred inside Dean. He wanted to turn all the way toward Cas and kiss him unresisting down into the crappy saggy motel mattress.

The shower water stopped. “No. Yes? I don’t,—I don’t know?” Dean tried out all the answers but none seemed right. He could only focus on Cas’s hand running through his hair, massaging the back of his neck and the top of his shoulder, and the other hand coming up to turn Dean’s face toward him.

“Well, take it from me,”—Cas’s mouth ghosting over Dean’s cheekbones, not even really kisses, technically— “it’s a very bad habit, and I think you should nip it in the bud,”—finally resting his forehead against Dean’s, both of them breathing a little harder, a little dizzy. “Also if there were ever a next time, there would be no take-backs, because I would personally murder you. By which I mean, leave you to the scant few miserable years you would have left on earth without me,—not because I’m so desirable. But because we _belong_ together.”

“And I _know_ that, see, that’s why I called Charlie,” Dean started, but then decided to shut up so Cas would kiss him, couldn’t think beyond reaching out blindly, arms aching to hold Cas’s body against his after mere hours apart; and just as he wrapped his arms around Cas’s waist and their mouths found each other, the bathroom door opened and Sam made a singular high-pitched sound, one they would all delight in imitating and mocking for many years to come.

•

Eventually Dean lay on his side on one bed (pillows under his throbbing shoulder, which he refused to let anyone look at or touch) with Sam sprawled out more or less stunned on the other bed, Cas curled at Dean’s feet propped up on an elbow, and Charlie on speakerphone, before it all got sorted out.

Dean’s stomach kept growling and he was torn between wanting Waffle House and wanting to take all the Aleve and sleep next to Cas for like an entire week.

“So…you’re un-broken-up, then,” said Sam, sounding dubious.

Charlie made an impatient noise. “They weren’t ever really broken up, just our big brother is an idiot.”

“Jerk,” muttered Dean.

“Bitch,” retorted Charlie.

Sam’s eyebrows shot up; Dean gave an apologetic shrug. “You weren’t around.”

“You know, if we could only extract and bottle whatever it is that makes Winchesters think they can’t have nice things, we could use it as a poison,” added Charlie speculatively. “Better than silver! Guaranteed to kill any monster!”

Dean rolled his eyes. Cas frowned and swatted his ankle, but then didn’t move his hand away. Sam couldn’t seem to stop staring at both of them.

“Right,” Dean said, trying to lever himself upright off the pillows and not wince because of his goddamned shoulder, “so this has been…you know what, not fun, but it’s definitely been…something. We’re all going to get breakfast and then sleep it off—” he raised a hand, cutting off Sam’s horrified expression— “and I’ll get another room, okay, everyone just keep your panties on, and Charlie, you good holding down the fort till Sam gets back?”

Charlie made a _bleep-blorp_ sound that was her and Dean’s inside joke for _I know you worry about me but don’t be a moron_ , and summarily disconnected the call. His phone vibrated almost in the same instant and he looked down surreptitiously to see her text: _We’re talking later before you screw this up any worse, nerf herder._

Cas rolled off the bed, giving Dean’s ankle an affectionate squeeze, and went into the bathroom, with this new instinctive tact he’d somehow developed, leaving Sam to look at Dean with his worst _why must you punish me like this_ face. 

Dean needed more people around him who communicated normally. He cleared his throat and picked at the little polyester pills on the bedspread.

“So yeah, I’ll probably go back to the island and hang out with Cas for a while,” Dean said carefully, not looking at Sam or at anything really, trying to make it seem casual, trying not to sound like this was his life now and being anywhere but with Cas was already starting to seem unimaginable.

Sam made that amused sound somewhere between an air-break and a laugh. “If you don’t, I’ll personally kill you.”

“Like you could,” he scoffed. He still could feel Castiel’s fingers around his ankle.

Sam stood up and stretched, his own bad shoulder popping in its socket. He said something vague about ice and grabbed the bucket, leaving just as Cas came out of the bathroom, drying water droplets off his face with the tiny motel towel, and reached a hand down to Dean. Dean took it and stood up slowly, wincing.

“Did you know the Waffle House will make your grilled cheese sandwich in the waffle iron, if you ask?”

Cas let go of Dean’s hand to pull on his jacket. “Yes, I did know that, probably because you remind us every time we go to Waffle House.”

“I do?” Dean drew him unnecessarily close, pretending to straighten Cas’s collar, which didn’t need straightening. Sam came back, clearing his throat as he entered.

“Okay smartass, but did you also know that in natural disasters, FEMA uses something called the—”

“[Waffle House Index](http://www.snopes.com/fema-waffle-house-index/),” Sam and Cas said together.

“Yes, we knew that too,” Cas continued, looking at Sam. “I think we need to feed him and put him down for his nap as soon as possible.”

After scattered hashbrowns, a pecan waffle, and two eggs over medium, Dean was in no mood to disagree. Charlie had gotten them a second room, so Dean fell asleep to the sound of the shower as Cas rinsed off, and woke to find the a/c turned down all the way, presumably so that Cas, wearing nothing, could justify sleeping pressed all up against him. Dean tugged the covers up more securely around them, then turned over carefully, trying not to wake him; without regaining consciousness Cas shifted easily from big spoon to little. Dean pressed his lips against Cas’s still-wet hair and drifted back under.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New feature to this chapter: play Dean/Cas fanfiction bingo! take a sip every time you spot a cliché! (Caution: drink beer not spirits or inevitably you will be going ON A BENDER. 
> 
> Posting early today because it's a bit shorter of a chapter, and also because of the sexy adverb wrangling of the fabulously brainy [betts](http://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts). She is half of my favorite OTP, the other half of whom of course is lowly me. One more chapter to go—thanks for hanging in there through the angst, y'all! I shall reward you as best I can with chapter four.
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://twitter.com/jsalowe) to voice your vociferous well-argued complaints.


	4. Chapter 4

He dreamt, and it didn’t start out as a nightmare; but then they rarely did.

He was back in the old house in Lawrence and there was a party in progress, like the poker nights Bobby had sometimes hosted, crowded with hunters nodding at each other over their beer and, from somewhere, the oily rich scent of a wild turkey being deep-fried. Dean kept looking for his mom, but no one could tell him where she was. He went through room after room, always just missing her.

Finally he stepped outside onto the back porch—and now it _was_ Bobby’s house, with the grove just visible, wreathed in mist, down the hill from what had used to be a fruit orchard when Karen was alive. At last he saw Mom, wearing her favorite summer pedal pushers, pastel blue like a bird’s egg. She had her shirt lifted up off her waist as she filled it with small apples from a broken, gnarled tree, branches black, wrought-iron and twisted, wet with dew. He tried to tell her they had to run, had to get away, tugged at her arm in frustration, but she only smiled and offered him an apple—they had no time for this, they had to hurry, should he just pick her up and _carry_ her—

Then they were on a beach in the dark with broken-down pilings, and the water a filthy yet luminous gray, stinky and briny, slurring up onto the sand. Mom kept throwing apples into the ocean one by one, skipping them like stones across the water’s surface, floating with trash. Dean could look out across to see rip currents evenly spaced under a pudgy more-than-half moon, and started wading out after her. She was already hip-depth, the brackish water sloshing up to her arms; he imagined their bodies sodden and waterlogged, part of some tidal ecology festering with crabs and whatever small monsters eat a corpse. Again he tried to warn her, tried to shout—

“Dean, wake up,” Cas said, muffled, into the skin at his nape; and with a gasp he was wide-awake then, feeling disbelief at the silky length of Cas, naked, pressed up behind him, all that warm satiny skin brushing up against all of his. “I am,” he said, unnecessarily, and then Cas was rolling him over and mouthing down his ribcage to his hips, and—“oh God, I, you,” he barely got out, croaking, before everything went dark and numb except the soft hot suck of Cas’s mouth.

•  


The only problem with the trip back, after awkward goodbyes with Sam, was that Cas refused to let him ride the Enfield, which made Dean spectacularly sulky. Also, Dean couldn’t keep up with him in the Impala, so Cas got back a solid hour earlier and had time to pace around and be furious, if the look on his face when Dean came up the stairs and kicked off his boots was any indication.

It was afternoon, and the little house was warm and sunny, and light slanted across the bed. Dean thought of that bed already very fondly and sort of just wanted to skip the argument part and be in it with Cas. Who was fuming, and Dean’s brain only kicked in again when he heard his own name.

“—which is exactly what Charlie said, and this isn’t—it’s not like orbits that intersect and then we keep going like, like the graceless wandering planets you think we are.” He glared at Dean, who had to try not to laugh, because the effect wasn’t so much fierce seraph of the Lord as much as it was dyspeptic kitten.

Dean took a breath, then another, and sat down heavily on the floor next to his duffel and started rummaging. “Hang on, just—before you pull out the big guns. I know, you wanna rip a strip off me, but let me show you something.”

Cas’s cheeks had the high blush of color that meant he was holding back something blistering; but then Dean held up the strip of silk, and he opened and closed his mouth without saying anything, crossing the room to take it in his hand.

“You kept this?”

“Of course I kept it, dumbass,—why did _you_ get rid of it?”

Cas wound the thin blue fabric around his hand as Dean went on, miffed and reckless. “I mean, you were throwing away a lot of stuff around then.”

At this Cas startled and looked up, fist clenching, half-wrapped like a fighter’s. “You may have felt that way, but—do you know what whalefall is?”

“No offense, man, but I can’t handle a marine biology lecture right now.”

Cas squinted at him, that old peevishness on the surface once more. “I’m sorry, did you have something more important to do than hoping ever to have sex with me again?” Bad temper, Avery had said. Yeah, there it was.

Dean sighed and put out his hand for the tie. “You’re gonna wrinkle it.”

Cas held it out of reach, shaking his head. “So you’d rather have Jimmy Novak’s third-best necktie instead of me.”

“It’s not either-or, Cas,” he retorted, using a phrase he’d learned from Charlie. “You threw it in the trash because you thought it wasn’t _worth_ anything—”

“Doesn’t that sound familiar,” Cas muttered, turning away until Dean spun him back around, trying to catch his eyes. It felt familiar, that movement, as well.

“—but it _meant_ something, you dick.”

Cas finally met his eyes, his own sparking and lit with rage. “You have no _idea_ what it meant. Being so inhuman that I was responsible for hundreds, thousands of deaths, and never so much as blinked? I essentially killed Jimmy _and_ Amelia, abandoned Claire—you think a _necktie_ is something to be sentimental about?”

“Come on, we both know that shit wasn’t on you—”

“Then who _was_ it on, Dean, because I don’t see anyone else lining up to take the fall. Oh, that’s right—falling! I can die now. I _will_ die. I get _rashes_ , okay—I throw _up_ , I get sunburns and _food_ poisoning and when you threaten to leave me it gives me this throbbing feeling in my chest like I’m being stabbed, and it radiates out to my arms and hands and I _hate_ it, I hate that you can gut me like a fish with nothing but your absence, and I hate how horrible it feels to be without you. And you can’t do that again. Because I don’t know how to stop needing you now.” Cas moved away as his voice grew higher and more panicky, pacing again.

Dean caught up with him and reached for his hand.

“Babe, come here, okay. I, I’m sorry.” He took a breath. God, he was whipped already. “You know if I could have stopped it, I would have. I tried. _Sam_ tried.”

Cas barked a laugh. “Oh, we were all _trying_ , in both senses of that word. You—” His face was miserable and Dean only knew one thing to do, so he did it: he bent down that scant inch he already loved, and kissed him quiet.

They stood swaying, Cas’s jaw still clenched, holding back what Dean was pretty sure were tears. He moved his hands down Cas’s back in what he hoped was a soothing way. This was his doing. He would make it right.

“It’s my fault, okay, this whole thing. So I’m kinda jealous—we know that about me, but the thought of losing you to some stupid no-name swamp alpha? I get it now. I’m not leaving, and I meant what I said the first time—I can’t imagine leaving you. You can take all the pretty goddesses to the prom and knock them up behind the bleachers for all I care. I just, I need you. I need you, Cas.”

Cas’s lips trembled against his for a second, and then everything got smooth as glass and still, and Dean felt faint with relief. He tugged at the tie still wrapped around Cas’s fist.

“Give it here—I’m not letting you get rid of it again.”

“Once you’ve given something, Dean, you can’t take it back.”

“What, you mean like my virginity?”

There was an unexpectedly tense pause during which Dean immediately regretted saying this, because now they were both thinking it.

He’d figured they were past this kind of moment, but there they were at it again, just staring at each other, faces a few inches apart, their whatever-it-was so thickly impenetrable between them it was dense, practically waterlogged.

“Maybe,” Cas breathed, and through a series of mystifyingly precise post-angel movements, Dean found himself sitting on the sofa. Cas stood over him but wasn’t looking at him, instead eyeing the necktie speculatively, winding it this time around his own wrist as if testing a theory.

“Don’t be a cliché,” Dean tried to say, but he wasn’t sure any of it actually came out of his mouth, because the tie was gone and Cas was simultaneously kissing him and pushing his hands up over his head and his shirt off along with them.

He couldn’t _think_ when Cas did this, their tongues sliding together, Cas nipping at his bottom lip and the slow galvanic scrape of stubble along his throat, Cas’s open mouth dragging down his breastbone to his navel. Dean’s ears were ringing with how quickly they kept going from zero to a hundred. And if this was going where he thought it was headed, they actually did need to talk—

“Go on, what is it,” said Cas roughly, his cheek against Dean’s stomach.

Dean swallowed, not sure what he’d said. “Whalefall?”

Cas laughed quietly and it sounded edible, dragging his tongue along Dean’s breastbone before replying. “When whales die out at sea, it takes their carcass many years to fall all the way down to the ocean floor.”

Cas switched from one nipple to the other and goddammit, Dean was so easy for him. He shifted underneath Cas, already hard in his jeans, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Oh yeah? You saying I’m a dead fish?”

Cas nipped him just below the navel, and Dean inhaled sharply. “Whalefalls become their own highly speciated ecosystems, and support millions of organisms, entire communities, with their nutrient-dense remains.” He slid down Dean’s body to kneel (oh god, Cas _kneeling_ ) between his legs, unzipping Dean’s jeans and starting to pull them off, and Dean found himself lifting up his hips to make it easier, and hoping all their arguments would end like this. Just in case, he reached down and stopped Cas’s hand with his.

“Are we,—I just, are we still in a fight?”

Cas raised an eyebrow. “I think we _were_ fighting. I think I took you back, because you apologized so thoroughly and promised never to do it again. And were smart enough to shower before we left the motel. Also you bought me a chocolate milkshake for breakfast at Dairy Queen.”

“Who knew it would take so little to make a former _—hey_.” Dean’s voice shot up an uncontrollable octave, because Cas had deftly peeled off everything from Dean’s waist down and left it in a puddle of cloth on the floor, pressing his mouth to Dean’s hipbone and biting down. Dean pulled him up into another kiss and Cas took control of that too, pressing Dean back into the sofa and sucking his tongue and invading Dean’s mouth in long wet strokes as Dean tried to grope him through his jeans, moaning.

Just when he started to think maybe he had to get more air into his lungs somehow, Cas’s weird doorbell rang, sounding underwatery and vaguely MIDI, like a song from Ocarina of Time. Maybe Charlie had given it to him.

Cas groaned. “The Enfield…Cindy,” he began, and then stopped, making a face.

Dean gave him a special eyebrow, all confidence and glamour.

Cas sighed, raked a hand through his hair to sort it out, and then casually rearranged his erection inside his jeans. “I’ll be right back.”

Dean closed his eyes to recover, listening to dim voices under the house, and the sound of the motorcycle fading in the distance. When he opened them again Cas was vaulting up the stairs and then bent over by the bed, opening his nightstand to take out things Dean wasn’t quite able to bring himself to look at. He felt, he realized, extremely naked.

“Cas, wait, before this goes any—have you _done_ this? Like, either way?”

“Actually, with Sara and Cindy,” he said, sitting down next to Dean, nudging his shoulder downward so Dean was lying down longways on the couch, rather than upright. Dean went with the shove, easy, still staring up at him.

“You’ve, how is that even pos—wait, are you saying, did _they_ —you mean—?”

Cas laughed, but it was the warm-sun-honey one, where the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Yes: I am, they did—or, well, _she_ did—and I definitely mean it.”

“But you—didn’t it hurt?”

“That’s not quite how I’d describe it,” Cas said thoughtfully, pulling his shirt off over his head in a signature hair-wrecking move, and crawling across the sofa to rub himself against Dean like a cat, so that once again Dean’s already limited ability to think went sideways. The more points at which their skin was touching, the steadier he felt, and less twitchy, less like a decade-old falling skeleton sifting with infinitesimal slowness to the bottom of an oceanic trench.

“What did, what did whales have to do with this?”

“Just that what may seem worthless, isn’t. Your own argument, I believe—only I consider Dean Winchester far more— _valuable_ —than a piece—of clothing.” Cas punctuated this statement with obscene open-mouthed kisses down Dean’s chest, making him squirm, pausing only to kick off his own boots, and unbutton his jeans but still leave them on.

Dean sucked in a breath. “I, I haven’t. I mean I’ve never done it.”

Cas didn’t look up, kept on his relentless way downward. “I know. It’s okay, though,” he said distantly, shouldering Dean’s thighs up and out of the way, and here Dean had to shove his own fist in his mouth and bite down, because without preliminaries Cas was _licking him there_ and God help him he loved it.

Everything went more or less white, Dean’s vision bleached out at the edges like after a solid connecting punch, or that one time Sam had popped the Impala’s trunk not knowing Dean was there and it had hit him in the nose. Only more mind-meltingly pleasurable. He couldn’t stop trembling, eyes wet. It was like Cas was crawling right into the center of him, delicately yet fiercely, building a fire and dousing it only to ignite it again with each soft lick, over and over again, until Dean felt mindless with waves of heat. Sweat beaded on his forehead and he pulled a hand away from where it cupped Cas’s jawline to wipe his eyes dry.

“Do I even _want_ to know how you, how, how you know about this,” he stuttered when Cas took a break. He assumed Cas had stopped to catch his breath but in fact he went straight for Dean’s cock, sucking it down until Dean shoved feebly at his shoulders and made him back off, saying “Dude, your throat.”

Cas laughed and it already sounded hoarse when he said, simply, “I want you.”

“Okay, and while I—appreciate that, that’s good— _stop biting me_ —I don’t want you wrecking your vocal cords.” He tightened a hand warningly in Cas’s hair.

“Fair enough,” breathed Cas, and then Dean heard the unforgettable snap of a nitrile glove.

“What the—”

“Access to the clinic’s surgical supply closet,” said Cas, with maybe a trace of smugness, and then Dean couldn’t think again, because along with Cas’s warm wet tongue, something cool and silky was gliding back and forth against this place seemingly rich in nerve endings. Dean’s entire body seized up, and he held his breath.

In response Cas backed off a little, but Dean gritted his teeth and managed, “Don’t quit,” and he didn’t; Dean felt the soft insistent press of Cas’s fingertip alongside his tongue, experimental but not tentative, and all the breath came out of him in a rush. “Cas come _on_ , just—”

“I’d tell you to be patient,” Cas said, voice muted, his lips against Dean’s skin, “but I’m not feeling patient myself.” There was a long slow slick slide in, and Dean found himself moving back and forth, panting, and gasping when Cas rested one cheek on Dean’s thigh, then curled his finger upward and _there_ it was, his vision whiting out again. He flinched a little, and Cas stroked the spot again, but more gently this time, the glove making his hand smooth and liquid-feeling, until Dean let out a helpless, embarrassing moan. Cas moved up, mouthing at Dean’s ribcage, his collarbone, then biting the side of his neck, Dean’s eyelids fluttering closed. Those would leave marks, and he wanted them.

“Don’t expect me to kiss you after that,” Dean said, trying to sound disgusted, but it came out as a breathy sort of whine, and Cas’s grin went a little too feral. “No, I don’t,” Cas said, moving up to clamp his hand over Dean’s mouth and hold it shut. Dean’s eyes widened but he got impossibly harder, Cas now grinding against him, their stomachs wet with sweat and sticking together, and two of Cas’s gloved fingers fucking into him evenly and fluidly until he had to close his eyes, which felt like they were probably rolling back in his head. This was—this was happening. He needed it not to stop.

Cas didn’t stop. There was another burning opening feeling, which Dean guessed was a third finger, or maybe two more, and this time he pressed back into the sensation with something like desperation and made an involuntary high strangled noise, Cas breathing hard against his temple. “Dean, can I—”

He shoved Cas’s hand away from his face, wound their fingers together and pressed harder against his other hand. “Just fucking do it already, babe,” he said, trying to sound gruff but again it came out as winded and pleading.

“Fuck,” Cas said, his own voice breaking, “I want you so badly, I never thought—”

“Less talking,” said Dean, wrapping his calves around the backs of Cas’s thighs, pinning him in position. “More fucking.”

Dean felt rather than saw the full-body shudder that rippled through Cas, and then Cas’s cock at his entrance. Somehow everything became slowed-down; time seemed to stretch and expand into a warm sunlit bubble, Cas’s smallest movements melting Dean from the inside out in their careful heated precision. He couldn’t catch his breath, he couldn’t not move, shoving down toward Cas, and then Castiel was _inside him_ and Dean forgot what words were for.

“Oh _fuck_ me,” he said brokenly, and Cas covered his mouth again, thrusting shallowly, a little deeper each time, until Dean wrapped his arms around Cas’s shoulders and drew him in, hard, dragging his fingernails down Cas’s back. It hurt and he wanted it to, wanted to feel every inch, needed to be pressed as tightly against him as he could be, both of them shaking.

Cas stiffened above him and dropped his head onto Dean’s shoulder, stifling a groan and clutching Dean’s shoulder blades with both hands. “It’s too, you’re so _perfect_ , so close, I can’t do this—”

Dean found his voice. “Hey—babe, look at me?” Cas turned his head and to his surprise Dean found they were smiling at each other, Cas’s mouth twisted in his crooked half-grin, eyes dark. “I don’t care,” Dean said, emphasizing every other word with a roll of his hips, “what happens when. Just, we’re not _stopping_ —”

Raking his sweaty hair back from his face, Cas nodded, biting his lower lip and starting to thrust again, making them both gasp, Dean meeting him halfway on every stroke. Cas braced a forearm against Dean’s chest, but the sofa still bumped against the floor, Dean digging his fingernails into Cas’s arm and fighting to keep from outright whimpering.

“Oh god,” said Cas desperately, his voice cracking, and Dean thought Cas couldn’t be in him any more deeply but his hips jerked forward still farther and above him, Cas went totally rigid and silent. Dean leaned up and whispered, “I’ve got you, come for me, sweetheart, that’s right, fill me up,” and Cas cried out and Dean fucked him through it, slipping a hand around his own cock, swollen and leaking, and within a few strokes was coming too, pressing into Cas’s belly and stifling a scream into Cas’s collarbone, both of them fighting for breath; and then, still twitching, Cas started laughing, with an edge of hysteria.

“What, what’s funny,” Dean wheezed, blinking sweat out of his eyes, definitely not tears.

“Dead whales,” Cas said, breathlessly, and then: “Do you know how much I adore you?”

“Starting to get an idea,” Dean said, and their mouths clung together for a long, wet moment, before they separated to breathe again, still laughing, or crying, Dean wasn’t sure which, and didn’t care, as long as Cas’s arms were around him.

•  


They were both getting more sleep than they’d had in years; Dean was, anyway. A hot slant of light over the bed woke him, so he slid to his feet and rolled down the bamboo shades as quietly as he could, but Cas’s even breathing stilled anyway. He turned over restlessly, and Dean thought he would wake; but then he pulled a pillow to his naked chest and curled around it, and his even breathing resumed. The unbroken line of him from ribcage to thigh was unfair. The whole thing was unfair, took away Dean’s already-mangled agency. It still caught him off-guard that he could have this—give it and have it given back to him—after everything he’d fucked up with Cas before, after how he’d fucked it up only a day ago.

His eyes went blurry, and he snagged his boxer briefs and t-shirt and moved away from the bed toward the stairs, closing the door gently behind him and pulling on his shorts right there in the sun, then stood listening. Seagulls, sandpipers; wind, surf; human voices, people very far away, down by the Pleasure Pier (which Cas insisted was neither pleasurable nor in fact a pier, although Dean kept threatening to make him get on whatever ride it was that made everyone scream).

People. People talked to each other, “using their words” as Charlie called it, usually casting a variety of pointed looks at Dean. But Cas was able, for whatever reason, to cut Dean a ridiculous amount of slack in the word-using department.

“It’s because speech among humans is primarily used to defend against feelings,” Cas would say later, scrubbing at Dean’s hair with a fresh dry towel and combing it out with his fingers. “You think you’re using language to communicate, but there’s overwhelming research showing that the purpose of speech is about ninety percent just to focus one’s attention on the speaker’s face and body language, so that you can then read their body language and facial expressions for emotion. The remaining ten percent is for sharing information.”

“Cas, that’s—you can’t have it both ways. Talking draws attention to our feelings, but we’re also trying to cover them up? That makes zero sense, babe.”

Cas stopped drying his hair then, cupping the sides of his face from behind, and kissed one temple, then the other. Dean knew they weren’t a distinguished silver like Cas’s was turning, but just plain grizzled gray, and he felt a burst of discomfort which dissolved when Cas spun Dean around easily and knelt at his feet all in one swift movement, drying the hair on his calves and thighs while (Dean thought resentfully) deploying his eyes like it was ten years ago and he was some naïve big-eyed seraph blasting into a fucking cow barn, half-Special Forces and half-newborn baby.

“It depends on context,” Cas admitted, reaching up to dry the droplets off Dean’s shoulders. “Obviously an academic lecture, for instance, a class I might take—or let’s say you and Sam are telling each other information about a case. But even in the latter instance, there’s an undercurrent…”

Dean cleared his throat; seeing Cas kneeling between his legs was a little—overwhelming. “No, I get it. We’re talking about how to kill a, a whatever, but we’re also letting each other know if we’re okay or need backup.”

Cas stopped, towel in one hand, and put the other on Dean’s knee. “And it works even when you lie. I learned from both of you how to say, ‘I’m fine,’ but none of us has ever found it the least bit convincing. And you in particular—well.” He looked up at Dean through his eyelashes; Dean forced himself not to drop eye contact.

“I healed you as much as I could, Dean. But you should know—I’m sure you do know—all those fights came at a price. Your spinal cord, all those sub-concussive blows: it’s a kind of encephalopathy. Your corpus callosum and cerebellum took the brunt of the damage, so while your thoughts are mostly unimpaired, some emotions, such as jealousy—and your verbal capacities….”

Dean couldn’t help laughing at how grave Cas’s face had become. “So I’m punch-drunk? Like Muhammad Ali, right? That’s fine, Cas, it’s not like I was ever gonna give the valedictorian speech anyway. Plus all this is coming from someone whose idea of a big insult was ‘assbutt,’ so.”

In spite of the reassurance, Cas’s eyes were suddenly swimming, and it wrenched inside Dean’s chest at a strange angle, a weird piercing that made him lean forward and pull Cas up and into him. “Hey—babe. It’s fine, okay? The world won’t care if I talk less. Hell, it’ll probably be better off if I don’t talk at all.” Cas laughed, but weakly, into the side of Dean’s neck. “You and Sam, Charlie too, you always know what I’m thinking anyway—when the fuck did I _ever_ fool you.”

“I could never fool you, either,” Cas said, and Dean knew they were both thinking about the same moment: an uncrossable circle of fire, the exact moment when in fact Dean knew he was in love with him—or had loved him, before that—the night he’d had to use the past tense before he’d even gotten to use the present: Cas’s face stricken, eyes reflecting flames, frightened and remorseful and still _angry,_ but above all filled with a sick unfulfillable longing.

“Come here, sweetheart,” Dean said, voice unexpectedly hoarse, jarring them both out of that moment, where they don’t need to linger anyway, “—no, _here_ ,” and he picked Cas up all the way while standing himself, so that they were both on their feet, leaning into each other, foreheads touching, hands clasped between their chests, and then kissing but without its earlier edge or intensity, just a thorough sweet sounding of the depths.

•  


Lately, when he couldn’t think in words, much less use the ones he found lying around, Dean found himself listening to his family in his head, filtering their responses, sifting them for what they might be. He set off westward down the beach, watching bubbles open up as the tiny donax clams dug down frantically into sand so packed and wet it reflected light like glass. Mostly broken shells: ragged edges of arcs, scallops, cockles. One single bleached claw of a hermit crab. A few gobbets of crude oil, a severed baby shark’s head, a fraying piece of yellow plastic rope with the ends cut off, someone’s lost or forgotten flip-flop.

Again and again he tried to pick up what looked like a whole angel wing; but every time he lifted it from the clinging sand, it turned into a sharp-edged shard. He realized now the bowl of perfect shells Cas kept on his nightstand stood for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours walking this beach, seeking something an empty shell could never provide, maybe stood in for. 

Dean bent over and picked up a curved piece of driftwood, a twig really, satiny from salt-battering, and toyed with it, twisting it in his fingers as he thought about how he didn’t just stare at Cas’s mouth now but kissed it, and wanted to keep kissing it in new and different and urgent and belligerent and increasingly adoring ways. He tried to imagine what everyone would think if they knew.

In his head, Sam laughed again—his real, unbridled laugh, not the snarky one; the one with his face wide open and eyes genuinely alight, looking as though he’d hug Dean if he weren’t incorporeal and existing only inside his mind. Dean could see him talking but couldn’t read his lips, probably because Sam was saying something unbelievably corny and he really didn’t even need to hear what it was. He got the gist, anyway. It meant: _you’re my brother and I want you to be happy._

Charlie, on the other hand, rolled her eyes loudly and offered a teenaged huff not dissimilar from Claire’s, punching him on the arm and concluding with a stern, “Dude.” Missouri threw her arms around him and hugged him way longer than he felt comfortable with, because she didn’t give a tiny rat’s ass what made him comfortable and never had. Kevin didn’t even look up from his book, and Bobby only pulled his head out from beneath the hood of a truck briefly, wiping his hands on a rag before stuffing it in his back pocket and muttering, “Well, fuck if you didn’t get raised right after all,—no credit to me, probably because you’re Mary’s boy,” and then returning to the timing belt he was adjusting.

No one seemed horrified. No one even seemed surprised.

Dean looked out at the water: wavering distortion of pollution in the air, gulf shading from brown near the shore to an almost-blue gray farther out and deeper. Oil tankers marked in Cyrillic dull in the distance; a single clean white cruise ship coming into port. The pier lit up in the distance, colorful with neon as the sun dropped. (He should drag Cas over there. He should buy him po’ boys and draft IPA and cotton candy, and fool around with him on the ferris wheel.)

Then, she was there too—whenever Dean listened, Mom always reached out wordlessly, which he appreciated more and more, especially when he felt most languageless himself. Their connection had been from a time before speech, everything communicated by touch and food and smell, warmth and comfort. Like Sam, she just beamed at him, and held her arms out in total acceptance.

From the safety of those arms, Dean felt brave enough to turn and look at his dad. It was always unnerving because it was always unpredictable: you didn’t know which one you were going to get—the dissatisfied father, for whom nothing was ever good enough, who could only be blotted out with alcohol, either plying him with it or getting hold of a full golden bottle yourself—or the approving one, maybe a little bit post-booze, maybe a lot sentimental but that was fine, the eyes met yours and glowed and were proud, and this time you hadn’t done anything wrong, this time you deserved his leather jacket and long black car—

He’d kept staring out, forgetting to blink until he came to, standing calf-deep in the shallows (and Cas was wrong, it was freezing) and a crash of spray stung his eyes. He dragged a foot through the water, raising a dusty bloom which immediately settled down into clearness. _Fuck it_ , he thought, for the third or fourth or hundredth time in the last two days; peeled off his shorts and shirt, balling them up and throwing them what he judged to be a safe distance from the rising tide.

He shivered for an instant, flesh goose-pimpled in the air, until he launched himself out into the shock of surf, gasping and catching a mouthful of brine and then coughing. He flipped over to look up at the straggly low-hanging wisps skating past overhead. _Gulf junk_ , Cas called those clouds: vague puffs generated out over the humid warm water, scudding quickly across inland only to dissolve.

Dean stretched first one arm behind him and then the other, muscles trying to remember one six-week term of high school when they’d stayed put long enough for him to take a swimming class, which John had deemed valuable for a hunter’s education anyway. But he didn’t like this stroke, because you couldn’t see what was coming, what was behind you. It required trust, or anyway trust in yourself, and this had never been Dean’s (or any good hunter’s) strong suit.

After a single abortive attempt, he flipped over, dog-paddling his way into the smooth water Cas had told him about. To the south, farther out, where he’d be in over his head, choppy waves broke over so fast you couldn’t swim alongside them; they’d just slap you in the face repeatedly with prickly bits of seaweed. And north, closer to shore was another line of chop, shallow but frothy enough to catch you between strokes and fill your nose and mouth with gritty foam.

But last winter, Cas had told him about the untroubled quiet trough that lay in between, on a night when they’d both had way too much gumbo (arguing about okra, filé, and roux, and did you really need all three, or was more than one thickener an overkill) and an equivalent amount of whiskey before falling asleep practically in mid-sentence, Dean stretched out on the long brocaded thrift-store sofa, head pillowed on his duffel, and Cas curled up like a cat on the other end.

“It still moves fast; the long current will carry you from one end of East Beach out past the point, if you let it. But Dean, it’s magic, this serene width of stillness between the lines of chop. It’s like prayer, or sleeping with someone you trust—pressed against you so closely you can feel them breathing—”

Dean hadn’t thought at the time about how Cas knew about sleeping with someone. Instead he’d fallen asleep in the middle of Cas’s description; but now he thought he understood what the trough meant, as he floated there like a piece of flotsam, bobbing, supported, lifted, weightless. This runnel of cold water that bore him up, held him as if he were in a cup, a salty bath in midwinter.

He flipped over again to drift on his back, the taste of Cas still wild in his mouth, the smell of him interwoven with the scrappy salty decay of the Gulf. Cas’s skin sleek against his, all the edges and bones and planes of him.

Dean had it, now. He got it. He got him.

The less he talked, the less he tried to figure out what to do, the more he was starting to sort of get a lot of things. Could see that they’d always been right there, that Cas had been right there, waiting to fall into his hands, hands he thought were only good for hurting, hitting, inflicting desolation, left as empty and aching as the rest of him whenever he stopped for the night. And now his touch brought safety; brought them both, together, someplace he could almost think of as home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Truly it takes a village to write a sequel, or anyway it did for me. As with "Crawl," my inspiration for Cas living on Galveston Island (where I also happen to live) was [catchclaw's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw) incredible "[Still Life](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2796962)," which, you should drop this and run read that _immediately_ (it's also a little bit her Currituck, another lovely island, in "[There's No Going Back](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4265652)").
> 
> First responders to my own crime scene were, as always, the loyal [betts](http://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/profile) and [TKodami](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/profile); the former not only held my hand for an entire year but also explained dramatic conflict, because I am but a simple pornographer of the Lord and a dumb poet to boot, and I don't know how to fanfic; and the latter made some truly gorgeous how-did-she-DO-that large-scale edits. When I panicked again, next to help were my beloved Cla(i)res, [agentfreewill](http://archiveofourown.org/users/agentfreewill/profile) and [fireintheimpala](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weboverload/pseuds/fireintheimpala), with their most excellent suggestions.
> 
> Finally, [glassclosetcas](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RileyBrennan/pseuds/GlassClosetCastiel), [blue_morning](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_morning/profile), and in particular [wildhoneypie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wildhoneypie/profile) brought this fic home with their line edits and encouragement, when I wanted to salt and burn Cas's beach house and never see these idiots again. But I wanted to see _you_ again, is why I persevered; so thank you for reading. A third part, "Freestyle," is already in progress.


End file.
